Making research outputs as open as possible and as closed as necessary is easier said than done. It is also important to pay attention to copyright issues and to assign licenses to your outputs, informing readers and users what you (the owner) allow them to do with your article, dataset or software. When no licenses are assigned, or when too restrictive licences are chosen the outputs will not meet Open Access requirements that funders might have imposed.
For further guidance, please see:
- Which CC license should I use?, or the Creative Commons site
- Licenses for Research Data
- Licenses for Research Software or TOP 10 FAIR DATA & SOFTWARE THINGS – Research Software
In general it is recommended that you do not use the No Derivatives condition when licensing datasets, and to allow for the broadest reuse of software as well.
OA status
Many narrative CVs request to specify, next to the PID, the OA-status of an output, as the policy is: ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’. Specifying the OA-status of your outputs might serve as evidence of (one of) your Open Science efforts.
A publication, dataset or software is published Open Access (OA) when there are no financial, legal or technical barriers to accessing it. This means that anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search for and search within the document, or use it in education or in any other way within the legal agreements.
However, there are different forms of OA for publications. To find the Open Access status of your publication use the Unpaywall simple query tool. Do not use Pure to assess the OA-status of a publication because it only tells you whether the publication is available on the publisher’s website. The OA-status in Pure can also be a temporary access granted by the publisher (bronze) which is formally not Open Access.
To indicate the OA status of datasets or software, link to the place where it is published and retrievable, or mention the DOI, which has become the standard for datasets as well.
If a publication, dataset, or software has not been published OA, explain the reason as the adage ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’ is applicable to all research outputs.
Keep in mind that you can make publications OA in more than one way.
Guidance: