# Open Data - Which licence to use?

**URL:** <https://onscienceandacademia.org/t/open-data-which-licence-to-use/722>\
**Category:** Open and replicable science\
**Created:** [July 3, 2020, 4:12pm UTC](https://onscienceandacademia.org/t/open-data-which-licence-to-use/722 "2020-07-03T16:12:45Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![CataTorres](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/onscienceandacademia.org/catatorres/32/226_2.png) [@CataTorres](https://onscienceandacademia.org/u/CataTorres)\
**Post date:** [July 3, 2020, 4:12pm UTC](https://onscienceandacademia.org/t/open-data-which-licence-to-use/722/1 "2020-07-03T16:12:45Z")

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Hello everyone! I would like to ask you which kind of licence would you use to upload data in OSF? I don’t have any experience with this…

The kind of data that I want to upload is historical demographic data (e.g. census population counts by age-group and sex), which I manually digitized from old 19th-century books during my PhD. That took a lot of work, so I would like to make those data available for further research. In OSF I was given several licence options, but I have no idea which one to choose…

 ![OSFlicence](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/uploads/igdore1/original/1X/14248a2a34a4d6cd9f2cb7e1d12d4f94fdd1e973.png)

If you have experience with this and can suggest something I would very much appreciate your help 🙂

Thank you!

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**Author:** ![dbernt](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/onscienceandacademia.org/dbernt/32/789_2.png) [@dbernt](https://onscienceandacademia.org/u/dbernt)\
**Post date:** [July 3, 2020, 4:31pm UTC](https://onscienceandacademia.org/t/open-data-which-licence-to-use/722/2 "2020-07-03T16:31:27Z")

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If your goal is to make it minimally legally encumbered allowing the most possible freedom for others to use it then [CC0](https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/) is the way to go. Its’ purpose is exactly that.

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**Author:** ![sandyherho](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/onscienceandacademia.org/sandyherho/32/362_2.png) [@sandyherho](https://onscienceandacademia.org/u/sandyherho)\
**Post date:** [July 21, 2020, 3:59am UTC](https://onscienceandacademia.org/t/open-data-which-licence-to-use/722/3 "2020-07-21T03:59:53Z")

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To keep all the derivative products using your data free and open, IMHO, [GNU GPL v3](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html) should be a good alternative.