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Learn more about ownership and control how others use your data.
Clarify the ownership and rights issues for your research data at the very beginning of a research project, as these conditions will affect any future storage, sharing and re-use of the data.
Refer to the relevant ACU policies and, if your project is collaborative, discuss and document an agreement with all partners.
When research data has been produced during your work as an employee of Australian Catholic University, the University may be the copyright owner.
ACU Higher Degree by research students own the copyright of their thesis and the data that underpins it but may enter into an agreement with the university.
If the rights to your dataset are retained and not assigned or transferred to a third party (e.g. a collaborative research project, publishing agreement, or employment contract), the intellectual property remains with the creator/s.
Refer to the the ACU Intellectual Property Policy for clarification.
Attaching an open content license such as a Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY) to your data to ensure that the data can be legally reused.
Choose the most suitable license for your needs, rather than developing a custom license, so potential users understand the conditions of reuse.
The less restrictive the licence, the greater the opportunity for data reuse, collaboration and correct attribution.
Please note, selecting a non-commercial licence (NC) may have unintended consequences for research.
The nature of research may change over time from non-commercial to commercial - which may limit the use of the data in a commercial research setting.
See the ARDC Research Data Rights Management Guide, 2019 (PDF, 5.3MB) for more information.
Make informed decisions about licencing your dataset using the ARDC Data rightsholder’s/creator’s flowchart (PDF, 123KB).