LCT: a licence clearance tool for research outputs re-use

This poster describes the LCT tool developed by NI4OS-Europe project and was presented at the 16th RDA Plenary (virtual), between 9 and 11 November 2020.

Legal uncertainty about usage rights and high costs in clearance of licensing issues, are very often a matter of concern, when it comes to newly produced content but mostly the creation of derivative works. National Initiatives for Open Science in Europe – NI4OS-Europe (https://ni4os.eu/), a European project that contributes to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) by supporting its activities in Southeast Europe, identified this gap and developed the "License Clearance Tool" - LCT (https://lct.ni4os.eu/). LCT is an open-source tool which aims to facilitate and automate the clearance of rights (copyright) for datasets, media, software and other content that are to be cleared before they are publicly released under an open licence and/or stored at a publicly trusted FAIR-enabling repository.

LCT is a valuable resource for researchers and research organisations and regards both data-intensive Research Data Management (RDM) and the curation and handling of the long tail of science with the aim of establishing consolidated models of legal RDM activities. In six simple steps, LCT provides a guided approach for establishing the proper open-source licence required for the creation of a new (or synthetic) dataset, media, software, or for the re-use of existing unlicensed content. The procedure takes into account many potential data managers (i.e. users initiating or completing a clearance procedure) and different types of data, media works, software and even hardware. Key features of the tool include:

- A clearance procedure not bound to the user that initiated it, so it can be started and finished by different users.

- A crowdsourced clearance process as an option.

- Clearance metadata as an open-source resource.

- The possibility to achieve equivalence, similarity, and compatibility between licenses if used in combination, particularly for derivative works.

The current version of LCT provides guidance for existing standard open-source licenses. The work, however, is continuously evolving and new functionality will be added including user login/profiles and custom licenses in a future release.

LCT comes as a response to the increased demand for providing technical solutions to address legal aspects in FAIR and Open RDM (ORDM). It is, thus, intended to support researchers to publish in FAIR/open modes and data managers to compete against untidy, messy and not well-defined data ensuring the maximal re-use of data. It is a certification tool for complementing the trustworthiness of resources contained in open platforms, such as repositories, and ensuring their FAIRness in a standardised and interoperable fashion, an objective that is present in NI4OS-Europe activities relevant to onboarding of repositories to EOSC. In conclusion, it is an open-source solution, which aims to be a valuable assistant to address data sharing and reuse challenges.