Am I allowed to redistribute data that was shared with me by another scientist?

Question

I like to practice open science but for a recent paper, I am reusing data collected by another scientist. I asked for access the data and it was provided, but the original authors said it was only for my use (and that I could publish a paper based upon the data). In order to be transparent, what should I do to make the data available to others?

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Comments

You should advice original authors to post data in open access. That is definitely the best case scenario :-)

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Answer 1

Ideally, your collaborators should've given the data to you under a license. If you don't have a license, well, there isn't much you can really do. In most jurisdictions, no license means the fancy All Rights Reserved for the original author, and can yield you a lot of trouble in the long run.

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Answer 2

It all depends on the data set license. For some licenses, you would need the authorization from the other scientist. For other, you wouldn't.

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Answer 3

The easy answer to this is to ask the original author. Recommend to them that they publish the data online (via eg, Dryad, Figshare, Zenodo - this is all in another thread) and with an appropriate license that allows them to both get credit for the data, and allows others to re-use/remix/re-distribute it.

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