Licences

Providing licences that cover your resource increases the likelihood that the FAIRsharing community will understand the usage rights for the data associated with your resource, and aligns with R1.1. (Meta)data are released with a clear and accessible data usage license.

Licences are recommended for all FAIRsharing records.

Please also see the general information regarding our minimal curation requirements.

Selecting and Creating Licences

Licences already linked to your record. Any licences already related to your resource are listed in the "Licences" section of the "Licences and Support Links" tab. Any licences already present in your record may be reviewed here. If they need to be updated (e.g. the relationship from your record to the licence needs to be changed) then click on the licence you wish to update; a popup window will appear and you may make the necessary changes. If they are no longer appropriate for your resource, they may be removed by clicking on the “x” next to each name.

Adding new licences begins by clicking on the “Add a new licence” button. A popup will appear allowing you to search through the licences already in FAIRsharing. Start typing the name of your licence in the "Select a Licence name" field, which will offer autocomplete options as you type. Selecting one of the options will auto-fill all the full name and the URL field.

Licences are shared across all of FAIRsharing, and you may find your licence is already present.

Next, select the licence relation from the pulldown menu in the popup, and then click "Submit Licence Link" (for adding licences) or "Edit Licence Link" (when updating existing licences).

If you are creating a new license, ensure that the license name is specific to the license you are creating, e.g. “Resource XYZ Data Policy”. All licenses are accessible from all records, and therefore a generic label such as “Data Policy” does not provide enough information. Another curator or an external user may later on decide to annotate a record, might mistakenly choose the "Data Policy" autocomplete and end up with the data policy for your resource.

Adding an existing licence to a record.

Indicative vs Exhaustive Licences

Licences that cover the resource you are describing should be listed in your FAIRsharing record, as this allows the FAIRsharing community to search and filter based on licence. It is the licence for the content of your resource (e.g. the data within your repository, or the specification describing your standard), and not for e.g. the manuscript describing your resource. There are two ways to curate your licence information in FAIRsharing:

1. Are the licences you are adding here intended to be representative/indicative of your available licences, but not intended to be exhaustive? Then please keep the "complete list of licences" toggle disabled, and add all licences that you wish to highlight in some way, e.g. if a licence is recommended, or a set of licences are the main choices. Whatever information you provide will help with R1.1, but you are not necessarily stating that these are the only licences that might be accepted by your resource.

2. Are the licences you are adding here intended to be an exhaustive/complete list of all licences allowed by your resource? Then please enable the "complete list of licences" toggle, and add your licences.

Some examples:

• Your standard is released under CC-BY and therefore this is the only licence you need to add to your record, with the "complete list of licences" toggle enabled.

• Your database allows data submission under a range of licences: CC0, CC-BY, or CC-BY-SA. You list all three of these within this section, with the "complete list of licences" toggle enabled.

• Your database has its own licence that has been created just for your resource. Create a new licence describing it (e.g. "Database ABC Terms of Use") within your record to allow the FAIRsharing community to easily find the requirements. The "complete list of licences" toggle is enabled.

• Your database allows all "open" licences, but recommends CC0. It is still helpful to list CC0 within the FAIRsharing record, but it would be impractical to list all of them. Here, ensure that the "complete list of licences" toggle is disabled. In this case, adding CC0 allows you to provide some information to your users, but does not make a statement that only CC0 should be used.

Integration with SPDX

From 2025 onwards, System Package Data Exchange (SPDX) licence cross references are displayed alongside FAIRsharing's existing licences. The SPDX licence list contains more than 700 licences commonly used in free and open or collaborative software, data, hardware, or documentation. Each SPDX cross-reference is linked via the SPDX logo, allowing both a direct licence link as well as to the appropriate SPDX page.

Users do not need to add these links themselves; automated procedures will regularly check and update licences included within FAIRsharing records, adding cross references as required.

The example below shows the licences of the database figshare Plus in FAIRsharing, where five of the six licences have a link to the SPDX licence website, e.g. SPDX link of the licence CC BY 4.0 is https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html.