EOSC-Pillar Legal Compliance Guidelines for Researchers: a Checklist (printable version)

Please note: for the interactive digital version check: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6327668

This is a digest of the guidelines included in Deliverable 4.6 “Legal and Policy Framework and Federation Blueprint” and it was produced by the EOSC-Pillar project.

This document provides a guideline in the form of checklists to help researchers comply with the legal requirements of publishing, sharing and integrating research data. In particular the challenges raised by intellectual property rights, data protection laws, and regulations on non-personal data are addressed. The purpose of the guideline is to promote the implementation of FAIR principles
beyond their original scope, and to lay down the conditions for the effective realisation of Open Data and Open Science policies.

The guidelines are valid for all EU member states. For a more in-depth explanation and background material please refer to the latest version of the Legal and Policy Framework and Federation Blueprint report.

By leveraging regulatory flexibilities and taking into account legitimate restrictions to access research products, the checklists aim at:

1. Guiding researchers in the management of research data, or more generally, research outputs,
2. Promoting best practices to achieve Findability, Accessibility, and Interoperability of research data by focusing on the removal of unnecessary restrictions to reuse and open access to published products and facilitating the convergence of national solutions.

Checklists for research infrastructures accompany researchers through the life cycle of a research project and help them deal with legal constraints while adopting an efficient approach to leverage regulatory enablers. They follow the basic phases of every research project: proposal, implementation and review phase. Depending on whether personal data is part of the research each phase accompanies a section with guidelines on data protection.