Tug of war, Kathleen Tyler Conklin, CC BY-NC 2.0
This post was originally published on the University of California Office of Scholarly Communication blog.
Which of these is true?
“The PI owns the data.”
“The university owns the data.”
“Nobody can own it; data isn’t copyrightable.”
You’ve probably heard somebody say at least one of these things — confidently. Maybe you’ve heard all of them. Maybe about the same dataset (but in that case, hopefully not from the same person). So who really owns research data? Well, the short answer is “it depends.”
A longer answer is that determining ownership (and whether there’s even anything to own) can be frustratingly complicated — and, even when obvious, ownership only determines some of what can be done with data. Other things like policies, contracts, and laws may dictate certain terms in circumstances where ownership isn’t relevant — or even augment or overrule an owner where it is. To avoid an unpleasant surprise about what you can or can’t do with your data, you’ll want to plan ahead and think beyond the simple question of ownership.