DANS supports Open Science, and encourages depositors to make their data available ‘As Open as Possible, as Closed as Necessary’. DANS offers different licences for depositing datasets in the DANS archive.
For users of the Data Stations, an open licence such as CC0 1.0 or CC-BY 4.0 can be selected for datasets that are published Open Access. At the bottom of this page you can find a list of all the available open licences in the Data Stations.
If one or more files in the dataset require restricted access, these can be individually indicated and terms of access can be specified. The DANS licence (.pdf) is typically used for Restricted Access datasets. In the predecessor of the Data Stations, EASY, the DANS licence (.pdf) sets out the conditions of use for datasets in the Open Access for registered users and Restricted Access categories. Those conditions apply to you as soon as you can view or have downloaded files from datasets in these categories.
Read more about licence selection in our deposit guidance for the Data Stations.
Available licences
Open Access:
In the DANS Data Stations you can choose from one of the following licences for open datasets:
- CC0-1.0 is a licence with which the copyright of the dataset is given up, putting the dataset in the public domain. A user may copy, change or distribute the dataset without notification. Formal attribution is not required, but this is of course still common practice in science.
- With CC-BY-4.0 the copyright of the dataset remains with the rightsholder, but the user can share and change the dataset. This licence requires attribution and the user has to state if they have changed the dataset.
- With CC-BY-SA-4.0 the same rules apply as for CC-BY-4.0, but in addition the user has to distribute the dataset they have reused under the same licence as the original (CC BY-SA 4.0).
- With CC-BY-NC-4.0 the same rules apply as for CC-BY-4.0, but the dataset may not be used for commercial purposes.
- With CC-BY-ND-4.0 the same rules apply as for CC-BY-4.0, but the user is not allowed to distribute the dataset if they have changed or extended the dataset.
- The licences CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0 and CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 are a combination of the aforementioned licences.
- In addition to the licences mentioned above, DANS also offers the following other open (software) licences: BSD-2-Clause, BSD-3-Clause, MIT, Apache-2.0, CeCILL_V2, CeCILL-B_V1, GPL-3.0, LGPL-3.0, GPL-2.0, MPL-2.0, CERN-OHL-1.1, CERN-OHL-1.2, TAPR-OHL-1.0.
Restricted Access:
For datasets published with restricted access, the DANS Licence should always be selected.
© DANS. R.2.1.3. Version 1.2, May 8, 2023