Research Data Support

Data is considered to be a collection of facts and is not subject to U.S. copyright. But a creative expression of the data (such as a figure or table) can be subject to copyright in the U.S. Before sharing or preserving your research data, you need to consider your intellectual property rights.

• If you're re-using data from another researcher, you may not have the right to distribute the data (i.e. you can't post the data to your personal website, deposit it in a data repository, etc.). Check the data's license for more information.
• When you published your article, book, etc., you probably signed an Author Agreement. Terms in these agreements vary widely and can include signing over your copyright. Even if you created the figures in your publications, you may not have the right to distribute, re-use or adapt them (depending on the terms in your Author Agreement).

Want to learn more about intellectual property? OU Libraries helps faculty, students and staff with these elements of scholarly communication:

• Fair Use
• Creative Commons licensing
• Open Access
• Author Metrics

Contact Julia Rodriguez, Scholarly Communications Librarian, for assistance (juliar@oakland.edu).