The License Clearance Tool (LCT) comes as a response to the increased demand for providing technical solutions to address legal aspects in FAIR and ORDM. It is, thus, intended to support researchers to publish in FAIR/open modes. As such, the tool development has been preceded by extended legal search and analysis of most used licensing schemes. These have been put in a matrix, so as to allow the comparison "all with all" and unveil compatible and conflicting licenses. The first version of the tool provides guidance for existing standard open-source licenses only. The matrix, however, is continuously expanded and also includes custom licenses. The comparison of "standard to custom" and "custom to custom" poses a challenge for both: the analysis of the compatibility of licenses, but also the technical deployment of the solution.
The intended use of the tool is to provide a guided approach for establishing the proper open-source license required for the creation of a new (or synthetic) dataset, media, software etc. or for the re-use of existing unlicensed content. The procedure takes into account many potential data (media, software) managers (users initiating or completing a clearance procedure). Potential users may be researchers and research organisations.
LCT is being developed by ATHENA RC (https://www.athena-innovation.gr/) as part of the project NI4OS-Europe (https://ni4os.eu/).
The source code in this repository is licensed under the terms of EUPL-1.2 (the "License").
You may obtain a copy of the License in another language at: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/eupl-text-eupl-12
This work is funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 European research infrastructures grant agreement no. 857645