Q&A#
Does a license last forever?
Technically a license is valid while you hold the copyright, which usually in Australia expires 70 years after the author death (50 years if acquired before 2005). You can revoke a license and apply a different one anytime.If I move from one license to a different one, would the new one apply in retrospect?
No, a license is an agreement you enter in with someone else at the moment in which they obtain your data/code, so for them the old license will still apply. The new license will apply to anyone who download your data/code from when the license enters in use. If you update your data or code and a “old” user downloads the updates though the new license will apply for them from that moment on.What are my options if someone breaches the license?
The license is enforceable in court, but clearly that’s an extreme step. Usually people breach the license “accidentally” so you should first make contact with them and point out they’re breaching the licensing terms and what they should do to amend it. If the breach is of a serious nature, contacting the research office of your institution and seeking legal advice on the steps to be taken is probably the best course of action.How can my license be valid if a project or myself act as licensor when the copyright belongs to my institution?
If you are the creator of the data/code then you can apply a license on behalf of your institution. They won’t mind as long as the license you are using is in line with their recommendations. Most Australian universities and the ARC, which funds most projects, require open access for any research product (unless there is a valid reason not to).How can I license data partly derived from a “commercial” product?
You should first check if there is an agreement allowing you to use the data and if this agreement covers publishing derived data. If this is not in place a way around it could be to leave out the commercial data used in the project and substituted with a derived quantity. In this example the authors removed the wind speed mesaurements they used to identify a “severe wind event” and introduce a variable indicating if such event occured or not to ensure at least partial reproducibility.