UC3 :: California Digital Library Posts

UC3 is developing a guide to help researchers assess and progress the maturity of their data management practices. What are we doing? Researchers are increasingly…

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.

The UC Curation Center (UC3) has offered innovative digital content access and preservation services to the UC community for over six years through its Merritt repository.…

(guest post by Johannes Otterbach) First Big Data and Data Science, then Data Driven and Data Informed. Even before I changed job titles—from Physicist to…

Data management and data curation are related concepts, but they do not refer to precisely the same things. I use these terms so often now…

Last week Stanford Libraries hosted the third annual Science Boot Camp West (SBCW 2015), “… building on the great Science Boot Camp events held at…

Today, we are pleased to announce the publication Making Data Count in Scientific Data. John Kratz and Carly Strasser led the research effort to understand…

In a recent opinion piece in Forbes, Steve Denning provocatively asks, “Do we need libraries?” As a digital librarian, my short answer is “Yes, of…