OSF Essentials: Monthly Deep Dive - Licensing Basics on the OSF

Okay, welcome everybody. I'm just going to take a couple of minutes as folks come in to just talk about a few top of house things. First things first is that there's a lot of folks from the Center for Open Science here in this webinar. So as you're trickling in, please tell us who you are in the chat. Tell us where you're coming from, maybe what institution you're affiliated with, how long you've been an OSF user. If you do have specific questions in relation to the material from this webinar, which is around licensing on the OSF, please put it in the Q&A so that all of my amazing colleagues can help answer um those questions. We have 1 2 3 4 There's five of us here five of us here that can answer those questions. So please throw them in there. We love the questions. They're very helpful. I won't be able to answer questions while I'm talking. But if you need clarification, please um go in there. You will be getting a follow-up email with the recording from this webinar as well as um link to the slides. So if you miss things, don't worry about it. You'll be getting that. And And for those of you who are seeing this recording who were not at the webinar, you will also be getting the slides and links. You'll also be getting in the follow-up to this webinar. If you were here, you'll be getting a link to a discount on some of our self-paced training courses which are amazing and you can do at your own pace and have lots of different great features, some of which explain things that we're talking about today. But I'll talk about that a bit later. So this is the second or third, I believe, in our maybe even fourth in our series in 2026 of OSF Essentials webinars where we dive deep into OSF topics each month. And these are um in direct response to a lot of questions that we get on our help desk. Um and the the webinars are built around questions, workflows, practical needs you have. Um and um I encourage you to sign up for more of these essential webinars that we have on a monthly basis. Um I'll have uh some more information um at the end uh of the webinar um uh about how you can find out more and sign up um if somehow you ended up here and didn't sign up for the other webinars. So just a couple um reminders, please use the Q&A box for questions. Um if you want to follow along, I'll be using um and referencing our licensing help guide. Um introduce yourself in the chat. Um there's a couple emails here of people that including myself um who you can email. I'm Nadi at ORCID. I'm the strategic partnerships manager. We also have on this call um hidden under another COS uh events um name, Gretchen Diggen, who um you can email about questions about uh membership for some of our fee-for-service products, but also she's a metadata guru and can answer a lot of those questions. Um And I'll say that uh in in in addition to our help guide, we have a lot of uh amazing links in there that can help you with um questions you might have about specific licenses, how to choose licenses, things like that. Um and with that, I will jump in. So what we're going to cover today, uh we're going to look at what the terms of use actually say about the copyright um of data and materials um and uh projects and registrations and preprints that you publish on the OSF. Then we'll cover um the licenses you grant to COS and other users when you deposit or publish that content and and how your privacy settings change, what those licenses um mean practically for reuse. And then we'll talk a little bit about um some of the licensing choices and obligations you have in licensing material um and how to do that on projects, files, preprints, and registrations. Um and we'll talk about kind of general approaches to thinking about um ownership, privacy, um as well as licensing. So, uh there's a kind of ownership question that I want to uh approach head-on cuz it's the one that we get uh a lot of confusion about, and it's whether or not you own your work after you put it on the OSF. Uh you do. Section 6 of our terms of use says it pretty plainly. So, if you deposit content onto the OSF, you still own it. Um putting datasets, manuscripts, files, or code on the on the OSF doesn't [clears throat] hand ownership over to the Center uh for Open Science, COS. Um we don't become the owner of your research um because you are storing it or publishing it or sharing it with us. And we also, very importantly, do not have any editorial input on material posted on the OSF. It's a big point of confusion um that I want to uh also address there because um there is sometimes an assumption that um because uh of the mission of our organization that somehow we have some kind of editorial control uh over material posted on the generalist OSF. Obviously, community-operated registries um and collections and preprint services do have moderation criteria in some cases, and they do have um editorial uh control to a certain extent over the material, but that doesn't um impact ownership. Um And so, ownership of the material, again, is yours even if you are uh publishing it into moderated uh services. Um and so, because of that, our terms of use require that you do actually own the material that you're publishing or depositing on the on the OSF. Also important thing to keep in mind. If there's a violation of those terms, let's say if you're publishing material that you don't own on the OSF, um that that's a violation of our terms of use, and we can remove that material. So, what you do grant to OSF is a set of really specific, limited licenses. So, one is so that we can store and display the work um and the other is so that the public who are finding your material, other researchers who are searching for your material can use the things that you deliberately make public. And those are pretty narrow and defined permissions. It's not a transfer of ownership in any way. So, the license that you grant COS is perpetual and irrevocable and that's something to really keep in mind when you're thinking about public material on the OSF. So, if you delete an account or you delete material, it doesn't undo the license for content that you might have shared at some point because OSF users or uh readers may have downloaded or shared material that you did make public. Um so, for example, if you made a data set public and somebody downloaded it under a CC-BY license, you can't pull that permission back. Um the copy that they have remains licensed to them. And this um connects to some of the features of uh that we have for withdrawal for registrations and preprints uh which, you know, you can withdraw but you can't delete and metadata does stay behind including some of that licensing metadata that you that you may have published with those registrations and preprints. And all of this is uh intentional, the permanence of that licensing um metadata. It's in service of the scholarly record um and the whole point of um you know, putting a lot of material that you might license on the OSF publicly and make public is that it can be reused um uh to advance uh open scholarship uh frameworks and principles. Um and this is just again top-level um information to to keep in mind when you're thinking about choosing licenses for material that you publish on the OSF. So, our terms of use um also assign authority to set licensing terms on public material. So, an administrator um is a person who can identify the, you know, ownership of the intellectual property on deposited content and they can identify and then also modify the license that governs its use. So, on a given project or component or preprint, it's the administrator who should be setting the license. There's also contributing users, which is a person who can, you know, access or edit content, but they shouldn't be setting the license. They can, you know, add files and make edits and can change licenses, but that that should be a proxy determination that's given to them by an administrator. Um So, again, to think about how this actually applies to to how you might license material if you're on a team like a lab or multi-institution collaboration, it's worth deciding, you know, deliberately like who will set the license, who holds those administrator rights, because that's how your collective work will get licensed. And, you know, a lot of what I'm going to talk about today is about thinking deliberately about the material that you're putting on the platform and what you intend and how you intend for others, i.e. the public or people who may find your material, how you intend for it to be used. Um And all of the licensing is obviously gated by whether or not material on the OSF is private or public. And there's just a couple different delineations. This is elaborated actually in our terms of use and also in many of our help guides around the different objects we have on the OSF, but it's important to think about privacy settings in relation to to both ownership and licensing. So, we have public versus private and many of you might be familiar with that in terms of how we currently operate our project workflows on the OSF. So, projects can be private and only visible to certain users, contributors, administrators, people with the view only link, but it can also be made public. Material can be embargoed and it's in that case it's private until an embargo date passes. And that is useful for registrations obviously, which can be embargoed for up to 4 years. And then there's we have kind of like limited types of privacy. So this is the case for you know, registrations that have been submitted to a moderated registry and under review for example. So that means that like a specific user can view that material for specific periods of time. So again, top level, it's really important to think about the fact that a license is really governing the reuse of content that other people can actually access. And if your data set is private, the reuse license that you might attach to it might not be relevant because nobody can find it. Um And so the privacy settings on the OSF decide who can see it. They're not a license and the license decides what people can do with the material once they find it. So just keep that in mind. So all of that established, like why bother licensing at all? In some cases, like in our projects, it's not required necessarily to have a license. And that's because the ownership alone doesn't really communicate anything to potential reuser of that material. And so if you think about that from a search perspective, if somebody finds your public data set on the OSF, they want to use it, they want to build on it. What are they allowed to do? If you haven't attached a license, the answer is just governed by our like default copyright, which is all rights reserved. And the implications of that are actually different in different parts of the world. It's it's murky and it's unhelpful. So an ambiguous reuse position is not a good one to have when you're sharing openly material and data on the OSF. So um So you know, sharing and just making something public doesn't automatically make your work open for reuse. And so a license can can fix that by sending a really clear signal about how somebody may use the material. Can they use it in commercially? Do they have to credit you? Can they reuse it with alterations? And your license can answer those questions. So we'll just look at some of the options across the OSF. So, um, a project on the OSF um, carries a single license that applies to all the material within the project. You can also set no license on a project, um, if you want, um, because not every project is public, some are private, but you should license your project because it could be public at any time and material could be, uh, um, used from within that project. Files or data files can have their own licenses, within the metadata of that file. Um, you can set the license on individual files, um, uh, even though they're within a project with a specific license. Um, preprint licenses, uh, can be chosen during the submission workflow and, um, do vary depending on what, uh, moderated preprint service you're using. And registrations must have a license, which are a part of the metadata of the, um, registration draft creation, uh, workflow. And things to think about in terms of licensing obligations, so, you know, you should check to make sure that a decision has not already been made for you. So, um, we review this a bit in our help guides, it's a really important consideration as you prepare to publish um, material on the OSF. Um, some funders require or strongly recommend a specific license for any output that they've funded. Um, if that applies to you, the requirement is a priority. Um, and, uh, some repositories, not the OSF, do require the use of specific licenses. Um, some community-operated, um, you know, registries or collections, um, or, uh, preprint services on the OSF may have requirements. Um, but generalist publication of material on the OSF does not have a requirement, you can choose. Um, many institutions have their own policies also about how research conducted there should be licensed, so that's something you should check in with again your libraries staff, um your um VPR's office, uh your lab, your institution, um your funder. And also final consideration, which I won't delve too much into, but is um about uh jurisdiction. So, if you collected or analyzed data um in a specific way or place, that can um impact what license is required. Um and so that can sometimes matter for for example international collaborations. Um again really important top level is that COS doesn't choose um licenses for you. You do need to choose a license um and um the decision is yours, you know, made in consultation with all these different obligations that you might have around your specific um research project or uh collaboration um or study um that you're conducting. So, I'll talk uh briefly about how to license um all of the different kind of objects we call preprints, registrations, and um projects in the OSF objects. Um there are also workflows, there are also uh things you can publish on the OSF. Um [snorts] it's really important to choose the appropriate license to apply to your preprint in order to communicate how you want others to share your work. Um that said, um certain uh preprint services, like for example, here's an example of a uh submission workflow on SciArchive, which is a community operated preprint service on the OSF. They allow for the um selection of no license, but they only have um two licenses available for for their preprints. Um and this is something, you know, that you will uh have to consider um when submitting or publishing any kind of preprint on the OSF. This is the part of the metadata of the uh preprint that you're submitting, and if you search uh through OSF and look at um uh different preprints, you'll see the licenses displayed alongside other metadata on the right-hand side of the published preprint. There's a couple hand raises. I can't I can see that they're raised, but I can't answer them, so I'll just continue. If you have raised your hand, make sure you throw your question via text into the Q&A section of the Zoom webinar. In terms of licensing your registration, again, license is telling others how they can use your work in the future. It applies to the information, the metadata, and the files submitted with the registration. It's a requirement when creating a draft registration. You can select a license by clicking the drop-down menu to select an option. You can also edit a license during the drafting process of the registration. And to do that, you just select edit in the license field in the metadata, and that allows you to change the license. To apply a license to an OSF project, you can visit a project's overview page, and you can select one from a license picker in the in the the the metadata part of the project component part of the project. You can also select from variety of commonly used licenses. I'll talk about the categorization of those in a bit. When you open that project, you expand the metadata section in your navigation bar, and you select the license that you want to use. And if you have any questions about licensing a project or any of our objects on the OSF, um licensing is a part of the metadata of all of these objects. And so, if you go in our help guides, and maybe somebody can drop one of our help guide links, our metadata help guide link, there's a lot of information there about about editing and adding metadata to uh projects. Um just a couple of examples of like basic use cases and these are again coming from our help guides, but you know, if you uh you might want to apply a Creative Commons Attribution or CC BY license to your to a data set so that it can be reused. Um there are certain licenses for code that allow for, for example, open source reuse um or you might have some kind of custom license um that you might need to use to meet a funder or institutional requirements and those will all be um edited here in the metadata of the project. You can also, as I noted, um license a specific file. Again, this is within the file metadata. Um uh the that you can choose the license. Um metadata can be, you know, added to files again to help um facilitate reuse, to help people identify um or search by license to discover material on the OSF. Because files in the OSF are related to projects or registrations that also have their own metadata, um you don't have to repeat information on every file, but you can concentrate on the information that might uniquely apply to a file. So, um if you have a unique license that needs to, for example, be applied to a specific uh data file or uh code file, you can or code, you can um add that. So, when you open a project, um you uh you would open up the file and then um edit the file metadata um in the same way that you would for a top-level project. So, there's two families of licenses um uh that the OSF offers. I'm because the COS and the OSF is not um uh directing you to use specific types of licenses, that is um as I noted at the top part of the choice that you make in publicly sharing um and then delineating the reuse of material on the OSF, I won't go into too much depth, but you can think of um the two families of licenses, and there are many others, but as Creative Commons and open source licenses. Um And Creative Commons are often built for data, for text and materials. They're a good fit for, you know, preprints, different types of documentation, data sets, study plans. And then there's open source software licenses as well, and those were built for code. There's more permissive licenses like MIT's license, and then there's less permissive. And of course, for projects and in some cases preprints, there's also the ability to choose no license, and that just leaves default copyright in place. Again, very ambiguous, and in general we we we encourage and push you as a user to ensure that you are licensing all the material on the OSF that you do publish and make public so that it can be reused. And I encourage you to check out some of the licensing help guide resources like choosealicense.com, and other other resources that we have to help you decide what the best license is. Again, alongside with some of the obligations you might have for licensing material. So, three things again to keep in mind, ownership of material on the OSF, the privacy of the material on the OSF, and the license that you apply. So, imagine you deposit a data set on the OSF, you own that data set, you know that you own that data set. You may mark the data set as public. That lets us store the data set, display it. It lets OSF's public users access it. And if you apply a license like for example CCBY, now there are clear rules by um determine um dictate how users may reuse that material. So, um you know, they may, for example, use it commercially as long as they credit you. Um and that's the uh choice that you must make as a OSF user utilizing the platform um for registrations, for example, or preprints, or files, or projects. So, a couple of um resources uh again for you. I'll link them here. We'll drop them in the chat. If you have questions um about um any of this, feel free to reach out. Uh we have OSF support desk, but you can also, if you have really specific questions about a project um or about um uh you know, bigger bigger types of questions um that may uh not be available and the answer may not be available in our help guides, you can um contact us on our contact page and um write out a bit more of uh the question you may have. So, um I'm going to uh pause right now. I'll leave this up here. And I'll see if there are any There's a lot of chats in >> Yeah, grab a couple um probably want to answer live. Nania 1 um is are there OSF resources or training material specifically designed for undergraduate researchers? >> Yes, you're in luck. There are resources. Um and if you um in our follow-up email to you, we'll be sending through uh a a discount code for our self-paced training courses. So, we've just launched these on a LMS on Canvas. Um you can take these. Um there's a There's a fundamentals of open scholarship, which talks about some of the issues we discussed today around licensing and reuse. Um there's uh also a course on registrations and registered reports. And um just we're just about to launch probably today or tomorrow a third course on data management and sharing and these courses provide badges upon completion that you can share on LinkedIn and other places. They're really amazing and my colleague Crystal Steltenpohl has been working really hard to make sure that these are helpful for all types of researchers including undergrads. So we will look out in your email for for the link there courses. >> Awesome. Thanks Nadia. I did put the link in the chat as well for those that are looking for it. Um go ahead. >> No, I was also going to say I think a lot of the questions that are like specific to maybe a specific research project that you have like I think there's somebody's publish a question put a question here about like publishing a master's thesis project. A lot of these questions are probably best brought to your library staff at your institution because they can help you they know specifically how your department might function or how some funders might work or how courses work around um publishing material in different types of repositories of which the OSF is currently one. Um and they're probably better suited to ask some of those questions. >> Um yeah, here's another one actually that refers back to one of the previous deep dive sessions um is a question about registering a scoping review and whether that is best used as a registration or a preprint. >> Yeah, I would say the best thing to do so actually I'm probably mispronouncing your name but Akebomoe you should send me an email, nadia@cos.io. I can send you some resources on um uh scoping reviews um and how uh folks are using our um generalized systematic review template on the OSF um in as a as a registration for those um and we we do have a lot of uh resources around uh around that. So, just shoot me an email. Uh if anybody else is interested in that, too, please um shoot me an email but we do have I I don't know if any of us can access the link to that webinar at the moment, but we do have a public webinar on um scoping reviews from our last essentials if anyone here can access it. Um feel free to drop it in the chat, but otherwise we'll make sure to follow up in the follow-up email um to everybody here with that as well. >> [clears throat] >> Um and I think to answer your question who said uh I don't anonymous attendee common mistakes student make when starting first research projects, I would highly highly recommend checking out our self-paced course on the fundamentals of um open scholarship. A lot of those questions um sort of fundamental basic foundational questions about open scholarship practices um how how to start what what to do um with a study that you might be conducting will be answered in that course. Um and we also do have a lot of that material not within a course format, but just the raw material from that training available for free as If you go on COS um on our uh Center for Open Science website, um we have our training materials linked on our training page. You can find that um if somebody wants to drop that link, too. >> A few more folks in the chat um also uh interested in the scoping review. >> Okay, so I think that's great. I'll uh I'll make sure that in our follow-up to everyone who's attending now and who's registered that we'll include a link to our previous OSF Essentials webinar so you can check out the one on scoping reviews as well. Systematic and scoping reviews. I think here is have design um Okay. Are there more in There's many in the chat here. Okay, was there anything else Eric or Daniel or Gretchen or Mark that I've missed here? >> Nothing that's open. >> Okay. >> I think these are all >> answered? >> Answered. Just scrolling through the chat to see if there's anything else there. Um I don't see anything though. >> Okay. If that is it, um I think we will close it out. Um again, if you have questions, please shoot me an email. You will get a follow-up. If you reply to that email, I will be able to see that. Um it will also be sending links to our previous OSF Essentials webinars on metadata, scoping and systematic reviews. Um and we have many more coming up so please do sign up for those and thank you all for attending.