Licensing

This help guide provides an overview of licensing research data and materials and how to license your project, registration or preprint on OSF.

COS does not provide suggestions on the best licensing to use. Use the reference below and consult your institution to decide which license best applies to your research.

Why license your work
Learn your obligations checklist
The licenses
How to select a license
Licensing resources

Why license your work?

Planning to license your data, materials, code, and supplemental materials should be part of any research output that will be shared. If you share your research without a license, you are not clearly defining how you wish the research to be used. Licenses prevent your research from being used the way you did not intend. How a research's reuse rights are treated varies by place and context, so reusers need clear signals from researchers on what they can and cannot do with their research.

Learn your obligations checklist

Check for funder obligations. Some funders recommend or oblige licenses for the research they fund.
Check for data repository obligations. Some data centers and repositories require those using their services to adopt a particular license.
Check for local policy or institutional obligations. Some institutions have their own licenses for research conducted at the institution.
Consider multiple-licensing if your obligations are non-exclusive. If you are obliged to use a certain license that is non-exclusive, you can consider providing an additional version of your research under a different license.
Check the requirements for the country and location where you gathered and analyzed your data. You may be required to hold specific standards and should select a license that fulfills that requirement.

The Licenses

We urge you to choose a license best aligned with your research needs. If you are not sure what license to apply to your work, see Https://Choosealicense.com for help. The following information has been aggregated and adapted from the Digital Curation Centre and tl;drLegal. These resources may also help you determine the best license for your particular use case.

This is a short summary of each license. No information provided here is legal advice.

Contact support if you have questions, concerns, or feedback.

License	Description
No license	Nothing can be done with the content without the license holder’s consent.
Academic Free License 3.0	Gives you a copyright and allows for a patent on the software so long as you include the original software, any of its copyrights or trademarks and a note saying that you modified it.
Apache License 2.0	Gives the original copyright holder some measure of control over their content while remaining open source. It is flexible and allows you to distribute or create modified versions if you maintain access to the original version, publish modifications made, include copyright notice.
Artistic License 2.0	Gives the original copyright holder some measure of control over their content while remaining open source It is flexible and allows you to distribute or create modified versions if you maintain access to the original version and publish modifications
BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License	Allows almost unlimited freedom with the content so long as the BSD copyright notice (original license) is included It is flexible and allows you to distribute or create modified versions if you maintain access to the original version and include original license
BSD 3-Clause "New"/"Revised" License	Allows you almost unlimited freedom with the content so long as you include the BSD copyright and license notice in it
CC-By Attribution 4.0 International	Gives maximum freedom to the content, as long as you provide attribution to the creator
CC0 1.0 Universal	Releases content into the public domain Gives maximum freedom to the content
Eclipse Public License 1.0	Link content under the license to proprietary applications.
GNU General Public License (GPL) 2.0	Gives the original copyright holder some measure of control over their content while remaining open source. It is flexible and allows you to distribute or create modified versions if you maintain access to the original version, publish modifications made, and include copyright notice.
GNU General Public License (GPL) 3.0	This license is mainly applied to code software It is flexible and allows you to distribute or create modified versions if you maintain access to the original version, and publish modifications made, and licensed for free under LGPL.
GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 2.1	This license mainly applies to code software You may copy, distribute and modify the content provided that you state modifications and license them under LGPL-2.1 Anything statically linked to the library can only be redistributed under LGPL, but applications that use the library don't have to be You must allow reverse engineering of your application as necessary to debug and relink the library
GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 3.0	This license is mainly applied to code software You may copy, distribute and modify the content provided that modifications are described and licensed for free under LGPL Derivatives works (including modifications or anything statically linked to the library) can only be redistributed under LGPL, but applications that use the library don't have to be
MIT License	It is flexible and allows you to distribute or create modified versions if you maintain access to original content and include the original copyright notice
Other (OSF Projects only)	Include a file named "license" that details your requirements

How to select a license

Licenses that are affiliated with a project are automatically uploaded when that project is submitted to a registration or preprint. If a license has not been selected for a project, then you will be prompted to add a license when submitting. Note that projects, preprints, and registrations each can have different licenses. Learn more about licensing specific OSF products below:

Licensing Resources

The following resources can provide additional general information about licensing .

This Article Is Licensed Under CC0 For Maximum Reuse.