How to choose a licence
Do I need a license for privately stored research? No. For research outputs uploaded to your account and stored privately or in draft a license is not mandatory, as only you can access it at this stage.
Do I need a license for publicly stored research? Yes. All publicly stored research outputs are stored under a license. By making your items publicly available, you retain ownership of your research objects (as is often not the case with traditional publishing).
Please note: The list of available licenses may vary if you are using your institution’s or a publisher’s version of Figshare.
For free accounts in figshare.com, the following licenses are available:
CC0 (tabular datasets and metadata)
CC0 can be particularly important for the sharing of data and databases, since it otherwise may be unclear whether highly factual data and databases are restricted by copyright or other rights. Databases may contain facts that, in and of themselves, are not protected by copyright law. For more information on why a CC0 is a good choice for your data, check out this Creative Commons wiki page.
CC0 is recommended for tabular data and databases and is used by hundreds of organizations. It is especially recommended for scientific data. Although CC0 doesn’t legally require users of the data to cite the source, it does not take away the moral responsibility to give attribution, as is common in scientific research.
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CC-BY (figures, media, posters, papers, filesets)
By licensing your research outputs under CC-BY, Figshare ensures that your research is openly available whilst still ensuring that others give you credit, in the form of a citation, should they use or refer to the research object. This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work (even commercially) as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. It is recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.
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MIT
Typically used for software, this is a permissive license that does not put many restrictions on the reuse of the software. For more see: https://opensource.guide/legal/#which-open-source-license-is-appropriate-for-my-project
GPL, GPL 2.0+, GPL 3.0+
These licenses are ‘copyleft’ and add some restrictions to the reuse of your software or output; primarily, that those who reuse your work must use the same type of license. For more see: https://opensource.guide/legal/#which-open-source-license-is-appropriate-for-my-project
View License Information (GPL and GPL 3.0) | View License Information (GPL 2.0)
Apache 2.0
Typically used for software, this is a permissive license that does not put many restrictions on the reuse of the software. But for more information on why you might choose Apache over MIT, see: https://opensource.guide/legal/#which-open-source-license-is-appropriate-for-my-project
For information on research data licensing please visit the following http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/license-research-data
Please note, as a Figshare for Institutions user you may have other licenses available. However, we would still recommend the above licenses where possible. Please check with your institutional administrator if you are unsure.
