Licensing Agreements
All data collectors enter into an agreement with the archive concerning the level and type of access to be available to secondary users. A licence document is most often signed by both archive and data collector in order to protect the respective interests of both parties, detailing the conditions of the secondary access.
Under most such licence agreements, the archive is committed to ensuring that all access to the deposited data is governed by the access conditions specified in the licence agreement. They will ensure also that all users are required to sign an undertaking not to breach copyright by selling all or part of the data collection, or including it in a product which is subsequently sold, that users are required to acknowledge the depositor when publishing anything based upon an analysis of the original data, and to say that the depositor is not responsible for the quality of the work they have produced. And most importantly, users are asked to agree not to attempt to identify any individuals whose details appear in the data, where this is relevant.
Data depositors, for their part, guarantee that nothing in the data collection is illegal, and that the data collection does not breach privacy or data protection laws. The licence will usually also ask for assurances that the depositor is entitled to place the data collection in the archive and that the agreement of all parties who may have an interest in the data collection has been obtained.
In most cases, depositors are not required to guarantee the accuracy of the data or to take responsibility for any subsequent analysis. They retain ownership of the data and can continue to use it in any way they choose.
Archives keep records of who is using each data collection and can provide depositors with a full report. As usage figures of this kind are often performance indicators for archives with their funding bodies, such usage reporting systems are often quite sophisticated.