Legal Interoperability of Research Data: Principles and Implementation Guidelines. Version 1.0.

Abstract

The ability of the research community to share, access, and reuse data, as well as to integrate data from diverse sources for research, education, and other purposes requires effective technical, syntactic, semantic, and legal interoperability rules and practices. These Principles focus on legal interoperability because there tends to be misunderstanding and lack of knowledge and guidance about legal issues concerning research data generally. These Legal Interoperability Principles are offered as high-level guidance to all members of the research community—the funders, managers of data centers, librarians, archivists, publishers, policymakers, university administrators, individual researchers, and their legal counsel—who are engaged in activities that involve the access to and reuse of research data from diverse sources.3 The Principles are synergistic, so their greatest benefit is realized when they are considered together.