End User Licences
Most CESSDA archives provide a variety of methods for gaining access to data for analysis, ranging from online access, freely downloadable files, data on magnetic media and so on. Details of these are available on their individual websites.
Most will ask secondary users to sign a special undertaking licence form, under the conditions of which they undertake to:
- Use the data in accordance with the end use licences.
- Use the data only for the purposes of not-for-profit research or teaching and to obtain special permission for commercial use.
- Accept that the licence does not operate to transfer any interest in intellectual property from the depositor to the user.
- Abide by any further special conditions notified to the user by the archive or the data collector.
- Give access to the data collections only to registered end users.
- Ensure that the means of access to the data are kept secure.
- Preserve at all times the confidentiality of information pertaining to individuals and/or households in the data collections where the information is not in the public domain.
- Acknowledge, in any publications, the original data creators, depositors or copyright holders, the service funders and the data service provider(s) and to supply the relevant data service provider with the bibliographic details of any published work based wholly or in part on the data collections.
Other special conditions which might appear in such an end user licence could include the need to deposit in the archive any sub-files or derived variables created during the analysis of the data, to inform the archive of any errors found, to report any breaches of confidentiality or data integrity, and to pay any charges levied at any time.
For examples of such end user licences, see the ESDS End User Licence or the FSD agreement on material use conditions.