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Research Data Management for Students: Rights

How can you ensure that you have the right to use the data?

  • Agree on the use and ownership of the data, if you participate in a research project, do your thesis in a corporate collaboration, or use previously collected unpublished material.
  • Always respect the copyright of the data you use or collect.
  • Many open access publications, images, and other materials have a copyright license that guides their use. Familiarize yourself with the license terms.
  • Follow the instructions given by the person or organization storing the material, such as a museum, archive or library.
  • If you collect or use personal data, make sure that you have the right to process it. You can find more information in the section Personal Data.
  • You may need a research permission if your research is targeted at a particular organization or institution, for example. Check out the research permit at the University of Lapland.

Always remember to carefully refer to the data you use. Your supervisor will guide you with the practices of your own field of science or art.

Copyrights

Copyright must be taken into consideration

  • whenever you use data produced by others
  • when you use published works, such as works of art, images, literature, music, or books and articles
  • when you collect outputs made by people involved in your research, such as drawings or stories.

The author has the right to determine the use of their work. You can analyze copyrighted material in your research and describe it in your own words, but you cannot, for example, attach it as such to a thesis.

You can attach citations from public works made by others to your thesis, if there is a justified scientific reason for doing so. The right to quote does not imply the right to copy. For example, if you do interviews, you should ask for permission to use quotes.

Please note that everything posted online cannot be freely used.

Copyright licences

Licenses define the terms of use and sharing for different kinds of materials. A licence can be given e.g. to publications, educational recourse, research data, photographs and metadata. Creative Commons license system (CC licences) is the most commonly used system in the scientific world. 

The license does not remove your copyright. The established practices of references and citations must be followed also when using licenses. You must always offer the information about the chosen license and a link to the license description. Possible modifications must be mentioned.

You can find more information about copyright licenses in the Library's Open Science Guide.

Do you want to learn more about copyrights?

In Kopiraittila Academy you will learn basic concepts of copyright, such as what rights copyright gives to the author and when a permission is needed to use works.