Open Data Licensing for Digital Humanities

Why Open License?

By making scholarly work available under an open license you will ensure
your work is credited; help others to include it in analyses; link your
resources into a network of data citation, aiding preservation and
discovery.

Reference data is a special case; not only having research value in itself,
but having the potential to improve the quality of others work in ways
that cannot be predicted: the best thing to do with your data will be
thought of by someone else.

Using text mining techniques we propose to extract structured data from

the English Place Name Survey and publish it as Linked Data, for re-use in
heritage organizations across different sectors. To maximize the benefit of
this work, an open license is recommended for the extracted structured
data. http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/

The data license we are recommending here is the Open Database License
(ODbL) and its companion Database Contents License. ODbL has a
ShareAlike clause, meaning that anyone who makes use of the data in a
public project, and extends or improves the data, must contribute their
additions using the same open license.

It may seem as if a license limiting re-use to non-commercial purposes

would be appropriate for research data. With Linked Data, conditions on
re-use can be very hard to enforce the expectation is that parts of your
data would be combined, stored and republished on other systems. With
a ShareAlike style license, you still reserve the right to offer a commercial
license to companies who, for whatever reason, dont want to contribute
back their improvements to the data.

http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/ Open Data Commons is a

project of the Open Knowledge Foundation. OpenStreetmap.org is
adopting the ODbL for collaboratively maintained geographic data

Why ODbL?

Creative Commons licenses are meant for works tracks of music, stories,
pictures. However, CC licenses depend on copyright to work, and for the
kinds of factual information found in geographic databases, copyright may
not apply.
In the EU we have database rights and the ODbL makes use of these to
support the ShareAlike clause on the database.

An alternative option is PDDL, or Creative Commons CC0 implementing

the Science Commons protocol on open data. In both these cases only
attribution is required for re-use of the data, there is no obligation to give
back.