Meaning & purpose

A licence is a legal statement giving official permission to do something with a collection or service. Use this element to describe the type of licence that applies to the data or service.

The Licence element is contained within the Rights element wrapper.

Licence attributes 

Licence Type

A Licence Type is optional. If used, preferably specify a type from the Licence Type vocabulary:

Partners who wish to use Licence Types not currently in the vocabulary can contact services@ardc.edu.au to register a new type value.

Rights URI attribute

Optionally, include a Rights URI attribute to access rights and constraints information relating to the registry object.

Use in Research Data Australia

Licence information is displayed prominently in Research Data Australia to support researchers in reuse of research collections:

• faceted search option provided based on Licence Type information (mapping shown in the table below)
• licence logos displayed where available, for records that use the Licence Type vocabulary (where a URI is provided to a version of a Creative Commons licence, the appropriate logo for the version will display)
• visual indicator displayed where the licence applied is considered ‘open’ as per the table below

Best practice

A licence is recommended to provide clarity on the conditions under which the data or service is made available for reuse. 

• Use the Licence element to describe the type of licence that applies to the data or service. 
• Choose a type from the Licence Type vocabulary above. 
• A free text statement may also be provided. 
• Optionally, provide a URI pointing to the licence relating to the collection or service. 

This element may be populated from other metadata sources including:

• dcterms:license
• Data.gov.au License (URI)
• ANZLIC MD_Metadata.identificationInfo>.resourceConstraints>MD_LegalConstraints.accessConstraints>MD_RestrictionCode='license'

Nested collections and aggregations

Nested (parent/child) collections and collection records that describe aggregations of data or metadata (such as repositories and registries) require careful consideration when encoding rights information - especially licence information. For nested collections, the parent record and all child records should be encoded with licence information.

The following approach is recommended to ensure that those records encoded with open attributes are retrieved when a search in Research Data Australia is limited to, or faceted by, the "open" filter:

• Where records within a nested collection (or items within an aggregation) share the same Licence Type, encode the parent record (or the aggregation collection record) with that Licence Type.
• Where records within a nested collection (or items within an aggregation) do not share the same Licence Type, encode the parent record (or the aggregation collection record) with the most permissive or most common Licence Type in the nested collection (or aggregation), and provide a free text statement to clarify.
  For example:
  • where some child records within a nested collection are freely available for reuse and some are not, encode the parent record with the appropriate open Licence Type (e.g. licence@type="CC-BY") and provide a free text statement as a licence value, e.g. "Licences for datasets within this collection vary. See individual datasets for the licences that apply to them."
  • where some items within an aggregation being described are freely available for reuse and some are not, encode the collection record with the appropriate open Licence Type (e.g. licence@type="CC-BY") and provide a free text statement as a licence value, e.g: "Licences for individual resources within this repository vary. Refer to advice provided by the data custodian."

Refer to further detailed guidance on the appropriate licence to apply to collections that include Creative Commons licensed works.

XML encoding example

<rights>
<licence type="CC-BY" rightsUri="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/au/">When reusing this data, please cite it using the recommended citation format.</licence>
</rights>

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