Legal & Policy issues

Find out more about the legal and policy documents that stipulate the procesess and activities inside the CLARIN:EL Research Infrastructure and get important information on the licencing of language resources shared through CLARIN:EL.

Procesess and activities taking place inside the CLARIN:EL Research Infrastructure are stipulated by a set of legal and policy documents designed to help all stakeholders (resource owners, providers/distributors and end-users) work in a friendly and transparent environment.

Here, you can find all the legal and policy documents concerning the development, operation and maintainance of the CLARIN:EL Research Infrastructure:

CLARIN:EL Research Infrastructure fosters Open Data policies and data sharing, in accordance with FAIR Data Principles. Thus, resources and services provided through CLARIN:EL should ideally be open or shared at least for research purposes to all users of the Infrastructure. In all cases, CLARIN:EL resources are offered according to explicit legal terms and conditions clearly indicated at the licence text accompanying each and every resource. CLARIN:EL resources may be associated with more than one licence, if access to it is given under different conditions for different users and/or intended uses.

Access to language resources and processing services is open to all through the CLARIN:EL Central Inventory, in accordance to their relevant licensing terms.

CLARIN:EL metadata are licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution International licence (CC-BY) version 4.0 or higher. All CLARIN:EL users are obliged to allow the harvesting of their metadata.

Recommended licensing scheme for Language Resources

To limit the complexity of licensing, a range of recommended license setups are provided by CLARIN:EL in the form of templates for the LR providers to choose from.

The CLARIN:EL model licensing scheme, with a firm orientation towards the creation of an openness culture and the relevant ecosystem for LRs, is organised on the following axes:

  • Open Licences: Creative Commons licences (CC, starting with Creative Commons Zero (CC-0) and all possible combinations along the CC differentiation of rights of use) for datasets and Free Open Source Software (FOSS) licences for s/w are the first level of legal machinery applied.
  • Licences restricting redistributionMETA-SHARE No Redistribution licences, a set of licenses that allow use and exploitation of the resource, but not its further redistribution.

Based on these assumptions and guidelines, the following sets of licensing templates are proposed:

The standard and well documented legal tool for sharing knowledge and creativity (links below point to the Creative Commons website). The proposed version is the most recent one, i.e. v4.0.

FOSS licences are recommended for the licencing of free and open-source software:

META-SHARE No Redistribution set covers all expected combinations of licencing attributes excluding the distribution of the original resource(s). Before using any of the META-SHARE NoRedistribution licences, please contact the Legal Helpdesk for assistance. We will provide you with guidance as to which licence may be the most appropriate for you and how you could implement it.

One page overview of the MS-NoRed licences and their attributes.