Approved by the DDR Program Committee, June 12, 2017.
The default waiver suggested for research data deposited within the Duke Digital Repository is a CC0 public domain dedication. The CC0 waiver reduces many legal and technical obstacles to data reuse that can arise from applying other licenses (such as attribution stacking). Since in many jurisdictions data may not be copyrightable, the CC0 waiver also removes legal questions related to the copyright status of datasets. While the CC0 waiver does not require attribution, growing community and data citation norms create an expectation that users will properly cite data in the same manner they would any other form of scholarly communication.
If releasing your data into the public domain is not appropriate, data depositors may elect to apply another Creative Commons license to their data. We encourage data depositors to carefully consider both their rights to assign a license to the data as well as what license might be required by other stakeholders including funders and journals. If you have questions about licensing your data, please contact askdata@duke.edu or the Duke Libraries Office of Scholarly Communications (scholarworks@duke.edu).