The Scope of Creative Commons Licenses for Sharing and Using Research Data Within an Institutional Repository

Abstract

Summary The purpose of this article is a civil analysis of the scopes of authorizations contained in creative commons licenses in the context of their potential use in the activities of an institutional repository. The reference point for the considerations are also the conditions for sharing and transferring public sector information for re-use set out in the Open Data Act of 2021. The material, temporal and territorial scope of the Creative Commons licenses has been specified. The task requires, in particular, the examination of the standards of open licenses in the light of the provisions of the Copyright Act of February 4, 1994 and the Act of July 27, 2001 on the protection of databases. It seems significant in the context of the problems regarding to the functioning of the Creative Commons licenses under Polish law. This type of analysis seems all the more justified because in the case of research data, the subject of the authorization may not only be a work, but a database or the subject of related rights. In the course of the research, the dogmatic-legal and legal-comparative methods were mainly used. It should be concluded that the reference to standard open Creative Commons licenses enables the obliged entity to properly fulfill its obligations to define the content of the conditions for re-use specified in particular in Art. 15 of the Act on Open Data of 2021. The presented principles of recognition of authorship satisfy the obligation to inform about the source and time of generating and obtaining public sector information from the obliged entity. In turn, the obligations relating to the exploitation of derivative works specify the conditions for the obligation to inform re-used public sector information about the processing. It should be recognized that referring to the Creative Commons licenses within institutional repositories may be appropriate, taking into account the indicated shortcomings, discrepancies and the lack of full synchronization of the developed international standards with the Polish legal order.