Research integrity
The reputation of the FMI as an elite research institution depends on the high-quality research conducted by its research staff. To continue to meet the highest accepted standards, the FMI takes as its starting point the guidelines for the responsible conduct of research published by the Finnish National Board of Research Integrity, the key elements of which are integrity, meticulousness, accuracy, and transparency in conducting research, and in recording, presenting, and evaluating the research results.
The FMI expects all its researchers to abide by its professional standards of research integrity.
Responsible conduct of research
The responsibility of abiding by good scientific practices rests on the shoulders of each individual researcher but also on the research community as a whole.
The premises for responsible conduct of research provided by the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity TENK can be found here.
Links of interest
Finnish National board of research integrity TENK
European Code of conduct for research integrity
European Textbook on Ethics in Research
Singapore statement on Research Integrity
Licenses
FMI is committed to promoting open science. In this context, the main goal is to make FMI’s research data derived from publicly funded research openly accessible to the general public to use, reuse, redistribute and modify the data, subject to the requirement to attribute, at minimum. Researchers receive intellectual credit for their work and recognition from their peers when they publish their results and share the data on which those results are based.
Sharing research material requires determining user rights. Using international standard licenses promotes interoperability and ensures the possibility for the reuse also in the future. By applying licenses to the outputs, any ambiguity over what others can - or cannot - do with the data is removed.
That's why use of standard licenses is highly encouraged. Before publishing under copyright law (including all related and neighbouring rights, protected research data or software) the ownership of copyrights needs to be clarified and transferred if necessary. The FMI’s data policy states that FMI is the owner of the data, unless otherwise stated contractually.
Only the owner of the data can apply a copyright license to the data. As such, the research data owned by FMI should be published under the least restrictive license as possible. In other words, FMI is strongly encouraging its researchers to use the Creative Commons licenses for the research data and metadata and one of the three licenses for the software that are mentioned in the OSS policy.
Creative Commons Licenses
Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that enables sharing and re-use of outputs through the provision of free legal tools.
A Creative Commons license consists of different elements that can be combined. Each element consists of a condition that needs to be followed by the re-user.
Below you can find short descriptions of the seven CC licenses as reproduced from the Creative Commons website.
CC0 - No rights reserved (Strongly recommended for Metadata)
CC0 enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law. More info on CCO.
CC BY – Attribution (Strongly recommended for research data)
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials. More info on CC BY.
CC BY-SA - Attribution-ShareAlike
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects. More info on CC BY-SA.
CC BY-ND - Attribution-NoDerivs
This license lets others reuse the work for any purpose, including commercially; however, it cannot be shared with others in adapted form, and credit must be provided to you. More info on CC BY-ND.
CC BY-NC - Attribution-NonCommercial
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms. More info on CC BY-NC.
CC BY-NC-SA - Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. More info on CC BY-NC-SA.
CC BY-NC-ND - Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially. More info on CC BY-NC-ND.
Licenses for software
MIT license (Strongly recommended for software)
This open source license permits also later commercial use by anyone, which is best for widest distribution and use of results. More info on MIT License.
Apache License, version 2.0
You can do what you like with the software, if you include the required notices. This permissive license contains a patent license from the contributors of the code. More info on Apache License.
BSD 3-Clause License (Revised)
The BSD 3-clause license allows you almost unlimited freedom with the software so long as you include the BSD copyright and license notice in it. More info on BSD 3-Clause License.
Any of the standard licenses can be applied, depending on the permissions and conditions the data originator wants to bestow.
There are circumstances, however, when a different kind of agreement is required (for instance when the data have significant commercial value, or when a clarification of data originator’s responsibilities and those of users in respect to the data is needed).
Links of interest