Licences¶
Overview
This is the Licences page, part of Essentials in the A-LIFE RDM GEMs collection.
This page provides a reference overview of the most common open data licences used in research data management, including custom licence options for restricted or closed datasets at VU Amsterdam:
- What is a licence?
- Common Open Licences for VU research data
- Custom Licences for VU research data
- Software and Code Licensing
- Further Resources
- Licence or License?
Supporting materials: Best Practices — Completing the Yoda Metadata Form, Best Practices — Completing the Zenodo Metadata Form
Authors: Irene Martorelli, Brett Olivier — Last modification: 2026-08-02 — Version: 0.3.1
What is a licence?¶
A licence defines how others may use, share, and build upon your data. Choosing the right licence is an important step when archiving or publishing a dataset — it determines who can access your data and under what conditions.
Common Open Licences for VU research data¶
Recommendation for A-LIFE researchers
For most research data at A-LIFE intended for public access, an open licence such as CC BY 4.0 is recommended. This allows others to reuse your data freely as long as they give you credit.
| Licence | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 | CC BY 4.0 | Allows reuse with attribution — recommended for most research data |
| Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Reuse with attribution; derivatives must use the same licence |
| Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | Non-commercial use only |
| Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal | CC0 1.0 | No copyright reserved — public domain |
| Open Data Commons Attribution License v1.0 | ODC-BY | Open sharing with attribution |
Custom Licences for VU research data¶
When data is Restricted (available upon request) or Closed (not publicly accessible), a standard open licence cannot be applied. In these cases, VU Amsterdam provides custom licence templates that must be added manually to the data package as a license.txt file.
For guidance on selecting the appropriate licence for your dataset, see the VU RDM documentation — Selecting a licence for your dataset.
| Licence | Template | Description |
|---|---|---|
| VU Restricted Licence | Download template | For datasets available upon request — requires contact person details |
| VU Closed Licence | Download template | For datasets not made available — only metadata is visible |
Custom licence in Yoda
In the Yoda Metadata Form, selecting Restricted or Closed in Data Package Access automatically limits the License field to Custom only. You must upload the appropriate license.txt file manually to the data package folder.
Software and Code Licensing¶
Licences for software and code repositories follow different conventions than data licences. GitHub provides a built-in licence selector when creating a repository, and uses the American English spelling License in its interface and file naming (LICENSE).
| Resource | Description |
|---|---|
| Licensing a repository | GitHub documentation on adding a licence to a repository |
| GitHub licence templates | Collection of standard licence templates used in GitHub |
| Plain Language Licence Summaries | Explains what each licence allows, forbids, and requires in simple terms |
Further Resources¶
Tools to help you select a licence
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
| Choose a License | Simple guide to picking the right licence for your project |
| CC License Chooser | Interactive tool to select the right Creative Commons licence |
| License Selector (UFAL) | Questionnaire-based tool to help choose a licence — also used at VU |
Further reading
| Resource | Description |
|---|---|
| CC Licences overview | Overview of all Creative Commons licence types |
| Citation File Format (CFF) | Tool to generate a CITATION.cff file for your repository |
| A License to Science | Blog post by the Netherlands eScience Center on licencing research software and data |
Licence or License?¶
Is it Licence or License?
Licence is the British English spelling, while License is the American English spelling — both are correct. You will encounter both spellings in documentation and on websites, even within the same website.
This collection of documentation uses Licence throughout. However, some of the resources and sources we refer to — including tools such as GitHub and Yoda, and pages on the VU RDM website (rdm.vu.nl) — use License or both spellings interchangeably. Both are valid and refer to the same thing.