Open Science for Arts, Design and Music/OS-ADM Guidelines

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These guidelines are released under a CC0 licence, except where otherwise stated.

Recommended citation: Chiara Somajni, Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra, Chiara Barbieri, Iolanda Pensa, Open Science for Arts, Design and Music, SUPSI, 2024, CC0.

Institutional foreword

1. Welcome to open science!

You're about to join a movement aiming to reform access to scientific knowledge, which is gaining traction and determining the emergence of a new paradigm.

Working with sharing in mind implies new ways of assessing, connecting and reusing research materials: these guidelines show you how.  

1.1. What is open science, and why is it relevant to you

Open science is the principle and practice of making research data, tools, processes, outputs and documentation available to all, the scientific community and the wider public. Enabled by technology, it strengthens and accelerates the production of knowledge and its understanding, benefitting society at large as well as individual stakeholders: scholars, academic and research institutions, publishers, teachers, students, and citizens.

Long-term sharing of research-related information, from the kick-off brainstorming notes to the final outputs and to educational resources, means anybody can learn about it and build on it, mitigating social, geographical, and disciplinary inequalities. Open science grants reproducibility and fosters scientific collaborations, which may involve citizens' participation (the so-called citizen science). It safeguards security and privacy and bolsters transparency regarding the research process's soundness and taxpayers' money spending.

Open science also boosts visibility, ensuring granular, in-depth dissemination and recognition of your research activities. This comes as a profit to the institutions you work with and to publishing houses as well.

For these reasons, an open science approach is increasingly becoming a requirement to access institutional funding at Swiss, European and international levels.

VISUAL:
1. The pillars of Open Science
2. The benefits of Open Science
3. Tools and services that open access and open science scholarship infrastructure interoperate with
4. Open access publications worldwide'

1.1.1. The challenges of open science for arts, design, and music research

Open science is practised in all research areas today. For historical reasons, though, some disciplines are better served than others. It's in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) that open science kicked off. Therefore, most resources, practices and guidelines are not designed to address some characteristics common in the fields of arts, design, and music.

a. A rich media ecology

Research in arts, design, and music unfolds around a multimodal media ecology: images, artworks, performances, recordings, sheet music, print books... Some items are too big, small, or fragile for digitization. Thus, a primary challenge is meaningfully translating this format variety and rich materiality into networked digital solutions designed to serve open science.

b. Legal challenges with source materials

In arts, design, and music, complex artefacts like publications and commissioned artworks are the rule and data ownership is often shared between creators, curators, cultural institutions, publishers, researchers and human subjects. The copyright clearance and assessment for reusing such diverse sources is hence a robust challenge and a necessary first step in opening up research workflows and further publications. Therefore, when it comes to open science, arts, design, and music scholars, teachers, and students easily find themselves under the double pressure of negotiating for openness "backwards" with the owners and curators of their source materials while at the same time negotiating for openness with their publisher.

c. Personal epistemic frameworks

The creation and presentation of research data and other resources are always acts of curation. This is particularly relevant for arts, design, and music (and the humanities as a whole), as data are deeply embedded in the cultural and social practices of the institutions that preserve, curate, and (co)produce them. Researchers rely on epistemic and organisational instruments where multiple layers of interpretations coexist and add up in a siloed way. As a consequence, the interconnection of research data and outputs may be more difficult.

d. Multilingualism

Research in the humanities and social science is carried out in multiple languages, more so compared to other disciplines, as they are ingrained in cultural and historical heritage and context-specific. This variety impacts on visibility and searchability of research data and outputs, although emerging tools are mitigating these side effects of what is otherwise a valuable characteristic.

e. A peculiar publishing ecology

Last but not least, arts, design, and music research publishing is characterised by specific forms of communication (e.g., monographs, critical editions, and edited bibliographies) and particularly diverse: beyond traditional scholarly journals and publishing houses, smaller entities can also play a significant role, who may not be competent or equipped for open access (→ 3.)

Useful links:

• DARIAH is the European digital infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (Switzerland is a member). It works with communities of practice, it "develops, maintains and operates an infrastructure in support of ICT-based research practices and sustains researchers in using them to build, analyse and interpret digital resources". Amongst the many services provided by DARIAH you find the Social Science & Humanities Open Marketplace, a discovery portal which pools and contextualises resources for Social Sciences and Humanities research communities, including tools, services, training materials, datasets, publications and workflows;
• Operas, the European Research Infrastructure for the development of open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities; it aims to aggregate fragmented resources and make them available transnationally, and it collaborates with DARIAH (Switzerland is a member);
• OpenAIRE is a non-profit partnership of 50 organisations (including CERN and the University of Zurich in Switzerland) established to support European research through a permanent open scholarly communication infrastructure; it monitors the European open science ecosystem and offers guides, training and multiple resources;
• Unesco is committed to "Making science more accessible, inclusive and equitable for the benefit of all";
• Open Science Framework (OSF) is a free and open platform by the American non-profit organisation, partnering with many US and some European universities, and available to individuals as well. Here you can search previous and current research project and brainstorm, register your research plan, collaborate and upload a preprint of your work. Notable properties of OSF are: getting a timestamped Digital Object Identifier (DOI) as early as your research plan is ready and allowing you to do update it; enabling the forking of research projects; offering a centralised project space for seamless collaboration, even if members individually rely on different infrastructures. You will learn more about how the research phases interlink with open science as well as about DOIs and their importance as you read these guidelines.

VISUAL:
5. Scientific papers by field according to data in OpenAlex, a catalogue of open access research outputs
6. Breakdown of open access publications by research fields in Switzerland and worldwide (2016-2020)

1.1.2. Open science in Switzerland

Switzerland's commitment to open science has two pillars: the Swiss National Strategy on Open Access (2016), followed in 2021 by the Swiss National Strategy for Open Research Data (2021).

The first mandates open access for all researchers whose work has been publicly funded: their publications must be made available to third parties free of charge based on the principle that results from publicly financed research belong to the public. To ensure the implementation of open access, the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries (CSAL), which involves most Swiss academic institutions, negotiates licences with publishers, moving from a "pay-to-read" to a "pay-to-publish" publication model. Other more sustainable publishing routes (i.e., community-driven, free-to-read and free-to-publish) are being explored and supported too.

swissuniversities, in collaboration with the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), offers scientists and scholars practical and financial support for the open access publication of their work.

The Swiss National Strategy for Open Research Data (ORD), commissioned by the State Secretariat for Education Research and Innovation (SERI) and supported by swissuniversities, ETH Domain, the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences, and the National Research Council of the SNSF, takes a further step towards open science, expanding its range to include research data, which, too, have to be made publicly available free of charge. It also introduces new means to empower the transition towards open science.

The ORD strategy defines openness as a prerequisite and a means of supporting high-quality research. It recognises the value of data and adheres to the 2020 Sorbonne Declaration, which determines that creators or rights holders of research findings must grant users the right of access, including the right to copy, use, distribute, transmit, and present findings with the aim of conducting and distributing follow-up research. Further, the ORD strategy states that «the authorship and ownership rights of the data creators must be respected, and, in keeping with good scientific practice, are to be cited accordingly. [...] Data creators have the right to reasonable first use and processing of their data within the scope of ongoing research projects and related publications, under consideration of the various time frames in different disciplines». The principles "As open as possible, as protected as necessary" applies, meaning that access restrictions regarding data «are limited to justified legal and/or ethical constraints or security reasons and must not be extended to metadata. No negative consequences will be imposed on researchers who do not share data for justified reasons».

Publicly financed research data should be accompanied by rich metadata and are advised to apply the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, → 2.3). The ORD strategy acknowledges research heterogeneousness in terms of disciplines' conventions, standards of methodology, and values, and that not all disciplines work with digital objects, granting researchers the freedom to implement procedures related to ORD as is appropriate for their academic community.

Further principles of the ORD strategy include pledging to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and to connecting to national and international ecosystems, which implies, on one side, interoperability of existing and emerging infrastructures and organisations, and, on the other side, compliance with relevant legal frameworks at the national and international level.

The ORD strategy and Action Plan consequently commits to developing infrastructures and services, supporting skill development through training and offering dedicated grants. An ORD Strategy Council has been instituted to steer the development of the Swiss ORD landscape, resulting from a partnership between swissuniversities, the SNSF, the ETH Board, and the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences.

Peculiar to the Swiss approach to research and innovation is the interaction with society. This translates, inter alia, and as highlighted in the SNSF 2025-2028 Multi-Year Programme, into promoting an active collaboration between scientific practitioners and non-scientific actors from the industry and society at large as a driver to a quick and extensive adoption of research outcomes.

Useful links:

• Digitalisation - swissuniversities is the main page of swissuniversities dedicated to Digitalisation, which includes the sections on Open Access and Open Research Data
• ORD is the website dedicated to Swiss open research data
• SERI, the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation
• opendata.swiss is the Swiss public administration’s central portal for open government data. It also includes data relevant to the humanities.

VISUAL:
7. Shares of open access and non-open access publications in Switzerland
8. Open access scholarly publications by document type as of 2018
9. Evolution of the impact of open access and non-open access publications from Switzerland

1.2. Creative Commons licences and copyright

Open Science needs two substantial prerequisites to work: a technological infrastructure and a legal framework. Digitalisation maximises the sharing possibilities of research-related materials and outputs and the correlated benefits. The technical aspects of this process are beyond the scope of these guidelines, though. In the following chapters, you'll find guidance on specific tools and resources of the digital infrastructure where appropriate. On the other hand, it is crucial to understand early on how to authorise the use of your work and how to benefit from open content because licensing your work according to the open science principles requires you to make decisions as soon as possible throughout your research process.

So, let's start with an overview of copyright, the context out of which Creative Commons licences (also known as CC licences) emerged and within which they work.  

1.2.1. Copyright, an overview

a. What is protected by copyright (and what is not)

By international copyright standard, any creative work made by a human is automatically granted protection, provided it demonstrates a sufficient degree of originality, for a designated period (typically until 70 years after the author’s death, though this regulation may diverge across jurisdictions, including in the US). When protection expires, the work enters into the public domain.

Copyright does not apply to facts, concepts and ideas.

An area that requires special attention, which is subject to emerging new legislation, is AI generated content. Output of a generative AI is not protected by copyright as it is not created by a physical person. Ongoing controversies revolve around establishing the threshold at which a work is created by a person with the assistance of an AI tool versus when a work is generated by AI without active control of the user.

b. Transfer of rights

In principle, modern copyright systems are composed of two groups of rights:

• Moral rights consist of the right to attribution (recognition of authorship) and the right to the integrity of the work, which restricts modifications to the original creation. These rights remain with the author and cannot be transferred.

• Economic rights (also called "Property rights") are about whether, when and how a person can exploit a work, either digitally or physically. They can be transferred to third parties (totally or partially) by contract, by law or by institutional regulations. Copyright agreements, publishing contracts and licences regulate the economic rights of a work, such as its reproduction, distribution, modification, adaptation, sharing, access, availability on a specific website, etc.

There are two possibilities for copyright holders to transfer economic rights to someone else:

• Transfer of ownership involves the assignment of all or some economic rights to a third party, thereby making them the copyright holder. This scenario frequently arises with employers and, deplorably, is common in traditional publishing contracts.
• A grant of permission to use the work in a certain way through a licence, e.g., a Creative Commons licence. In this case, the licensee is only a user, and does not own any rights over the work in question. If the licence is exclusive, the rights holder is prohibited from granting similar licences to others. A non-exclusive licence, on the other hand, allows multiple licensees concurrently.

A licence may be addressed to an unspecified range of potential users (pre-defined licence) or to a specific person (specific licence agreement). A specific licence agreement usually has the form of a contract that is signed by all involved parties, while pre-defined licences are accepted simply by using the work and/or data in question. Creative Commons licences are an example of pre-defined licence contracts.

For instance, if a work is intended for a particular event or occasion, such as a specific webinar, users have the option to use a work licensed under a Creative Commons licence or can establish a specific licence agreement by seeking permission from the right holder or the Collective Management Organization (CMO, → 3.4.1.) for the designated use during that specific event.

Copyright laws do not prescribe a specific form for the contract to be valid; even an oral exchange or an email can suffice. Rights can be transferred or granted through an agreement (a contract or a licence), law, or institutional regulation (such as a university's policy). However, for evidentiary purposes in the event of misunderstandings or disputes, it is advisable to clarify all aspects of the agreement in a separate document and have it signed by both parties for clarity and legal assurance.

c. Rights holders and owners of copyright

The core principle of intellectual property is the exclusive right of the holder to determine the use of their work. The term right holder refers to those owning some or all economic rights of the work, allowing for multiple right holders. Initially, the author is the automatic right holder, retaining certain rights even after transferring others. For instance, if a writer assigns editing and publishing rights to Publisher A, the author remains the right holder of unassigned rights, enabling opportunities like translating and publishing through Publisher B. If all rights are transferred, the author loses right holder status, requiring permission for any subsequent use.

d. Public interest and the exceptions

National and international copyright laws strive to establish an equitable balance between the interests of right holders and the public. Consequently, copyright exclusivity is not absolute; exceptions within copyright law prioritise public interest in specific situations (such as private use, educational purposes, text and data mining for research, right to parody, right to quotation, etc.), enabling users to benefit from existing works without requiring the right holder's permission. These exceptions are legally defined and impose specific conditions on the use of the work, e.g. attribution is always mandatory.

If none of the exceptions apply and the work has not been released under a predefined licence, the user must enter into a licence agreement with the copyright holder in order to lawfully use the work.

e. Related rights

Copyright law encompasses not only copyrights but also the so-called related rights. These protect individuals and entities involved in disseminating copyrighted or folkloric works, even if they are in the public domain. These related rights extend to performers (like singers, actors, dancers and musicians), sound recording producers, and broadcasters, offering lighter protection than copyrights but still safeguarding their contributions. For instance, while a song's composition and lyrics are protected by copyright for the composer and songwriter, related rights protect those involved in its performance, production, and broadcasting. Producers of sound recordings also receive protection against piracy.

Related rights give performers control over the fixation (recording), broadcasting, and public communication of their performances, requiring consent or equitable remuneration. Broadcasting organisations can authorise or prohibit rebroadcasting and reproduction of their broadcasts, while phonogram producers have rights over the reproduction, importation, and distribution of their phonograms.

When multiple performers jointly perform a work, protection applies to the group, requiring common agreement for the use of their performance recordings. A designated representative can make decisions for the group.

f. Differences amongst jurisdictions

When working across countries, check the national laws. The main areas where differences may occur are lifespan of copyright, fixation as a requirement for copyright to apply, exceptions versus fair use. The latter, for example, is in force in US common-law legislation. Another notable peculiarity of US copyright law is registration as a requirement to enforce copyright in court.

1.2.2. Copyright in Switzerland

The national legislation applicable in Switzerland for copyright matters is the Federal Act on Copyright and Related Rights (CopA), whose latest revision entered into force April 2020.

Useful links:

• The Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI)
• Webinar by Suzanna Marazza on "Copyright & Open Access in Switzerland", slide deck (en, it) Recording not edited

a. What is protected by copyright

In Switzerland, the approach to copyright aligns with the common international standard. Since April 2020, the updated CopA extends copyright protection to include photographs of three-dimensional objects, even if these objects lack originality. This change affects various types of photographs such as press photos, profile pictures, family photos, or ordinary photos of items for sale.

The duration of copyright protection is generally until 70 years after the author's death. However, there are two notable exceptions: copyright protection for computer programs lasts only until 50 years after the author’s death; similarly, photographs that do not exhibit originality are protected for 50 years from the time of their capture (if this is unknown, from publication), irrespective of the photographer's lifespan.

b. Moral and economic rights

Beyond the conventional moral rights, Swiss copyright law, through its article 9/2, also recognises the right to first publication, empowering the author with the discretion to decide when, how, and whether to release the work for the first time.

c. Rights holders and owners of copyright

The principle is established in articles 9 and 10 of the Swiss Copyright Act.

Article 17 of the same Act outlines a specific provision for computer programs: «Where a computer program has been created under an employment contract in the course of discharging professional duties and in fulfilling contractual obligations, the employer alone shall be entitled to exercise the exclusive rights of use».

d. Public interest and the exceptions

The Swiss Copyright Act establishes some exceptions to copyright. Here is a selection, possibly relevant to you:

• Private use (art. 19/1/a CopA) of data is allowed within a circle of persons closely connected to each other (e.g. close friends, family members, flatmates). This exception is restrictive: Facebook “friends” for example are not included.
• Education purpose (art. 19/1/b CopA): you can share copyrighted content within the confines of a lecture or class, but not beyond (e.g., the whole school or among colleagues from other institutions). The same principle and limitation apply to distant learning. Modifications to the content are allowed. If the work is commercially available, either online or in a physical store, only an excerpt can be shared. If the work is no longer commercially available, sharing a copy of the entire work is permitted.
• Use within a company (art. 19/1/c CopA): you can distribute a copy of the copyrighted content to colleagues working within the same institution. If the work is commercially available, either online or in a physical store, only a copy of an excerpt can be shared.
• Use of orphan works (art. 22b CopA): it permits the reproduction of works when its right holders «remain unknown or cannot be found following an appropriate research effort», provided that such usage is notified to the corresponding CMO (e.g. Prolitteris).
• Archive and backup copies (art. 24 CopA): public and publicly accessible libraries, educational institutions, museums and archives are allowed to make one of copy of each work that is extremely rare and has with significant value, to secure and preserve their collections insofar as these copies are not made for financial or commercial gain; only one of the copies can be made accessible to the public: either the original or its copy (which could be digital).
• Temporary copies (art. 24a CopA) which are technically needed to process the transmission of copyrighted data is permitted.
• Data mining (art. 24/d CopA): it allows researchers to use protected content, if legally available, for methodologies/practices made possible thanks to the use of new digital technologies (e.g., data mining or data scraping, the practice of analysing large databases in order to generate new information).
• Right to quotation (art. 25 CopA): you can quote content as a reference, comment, or demonstration to the quoting work. Only the portion of the work necessary for these purposes may be used, not a broader sample. Quoting an entire work is permissible only when altering it would distort its meaning, an interpretation that is not accepted by other countries. Additionally, the quotation should not hamper the quoted work's economic viability or violate the author's interests.
• Works on premises open to the public (art. 27 CopA): according to this, a «work permanently situated in a place accessible to the public may be depicted; the depiction may be offered, transferred, broadcast or otherwise distributed»; «[t]he depiction may not be three-dimensional and it may not serve the same purpose as the original».
• Reporting current events (art. 28 CopA): "for the purposes of information about current affairs, short excerpts from press articles or from radio and television reports may be reproduced, distributed, broadcast or retransmitted".
• Right to parody (art. 11/3 CopA): this permits the use of existing works for the creation of parodies or other comparable variations on the work, provided that the character of parody and critics is understandable.
• Use of works by persons with disabilities (art. 24c CopA): this permits the reproduction and minimal adaptation of copyrighted works for the benefit of disabled individuals, without seeking authorisation from the right holder. This exception does not extend to creating the work in a different form, such as audio descriptions of a text or of a film. It allows reproducing and distributing copies of works in a form that facilitates its access for disabled people. Distribution of such forms can be made online, but access must be limited to the circle of disabled individuals; unrestricted public access is not allowed. Moreover, such copies must be distributed at cost price of the original work (no extra cost for the adaptation is accepted). Importing and exporting reproductions are permitted under the same conditions and only if they are distributed by authorised organisations (non-profit organisations assisting disabled people).

e. Related Rights

In Switzerland related rights are regulated by articles 33 and following of the Swiss Copyright Act. Performers, producers and broadcasters are granted some exclusive rights for their performances or fixed production, and performers are granted the moral right to be recognised as such when they perform a work. According to article 39 CopA, «protection begins with the performance of the work or of the expression of folklore by the performers, with the publication of the phonogram or audio-visual fixation, or with its production if it is not published, it ends after 70 years. Protection of a broadcast begins with its transmission; it ends after 50 years or with the transmission of the broadcast; it ends after 50 years».

Copyright in Switzerland related to musical sound fixed in a recording medium (e.g., classical music tracks fixed in a CD): the composer is granted copyright protection (until 70 year after his/her death), while musicians (the orchestra) performing the composition and the producer who recorded the performance to fix it in the CD are granted related rights (protection lasts for 70 years, independently from musicians and producer’s life).

To use a track that is fixed in a medium, one should consider all layers of copyright and related rights protection: those of the composer, of the orchestra, of the producer, and of the broadcaster if the performance was meanwhile broadcasted on radio or tv.

In case of unfixed performance (live concert), Swiss law protects the music composition and lyrics (copyright) and the live performance of the musicians (related rights).

f. Books

According to Swiss law, copyright protection for a book extends until 70 years after the author's death (or the last author, in case of joint authorship). Translations of books are protected for 70 years after the translator's death.

If a book is a collection of distinct works (e.g., consisting of autonomous chapters or articles), each chapter or article enjoys individual protection, and the book itself is also protected as a collection, provided there is a character of originality in the selection and structure of the chapters or articles.

Some more specifics:

• For joint authors, the use and publication of the book requires unanimous agreement.
• If a work is conceived and led by a publisher, Article 393 of the Swiss Code of Obligations assigns copyright to the publisher.
• Art. 382. paragraph 3, of the Swiss Code of Obligations grants authors the right to a second publication of their contribution after three months from its first publication, but agreements between authors and publishers may specify different terms, including a longer embargo period.

g. Education material

Educational material can be any type of work protected by copyright: text, images, videos, charts, a collection of works, ect., and copyright rules apply accordingly.

h. Data and databases

Raw data that represent natural facts, like formulas, algorithms, temperatures, or information, lacks ownership. Legally owning this kind of data, akin to owning material goods, is not currently feasible. The legal status of data, though, is challenged by technological developments (i.e. blockchain, artificial intelligence) and a subject of debate in Switzerland, Europe and internationally: while some argue non-physical goods cannot have property rights, others view data as res digitalis and thus eligible for property rights (see Florent Thouvenin in ISBN 9783725587780, p.73). Copyright applies to the expression an author gives to data, contingent on its character of originality (linked to copyright requirements), excluding protection for the underlying idea, logic or concept. As an example, copying a chart without permission is a copyright violation, but creating a different chart with the same logic or with the same raw data is not.

Originality determines copyright protection for lists, charts, diagrams, or schemes created by individuals. While an originally structured and selected database is protected by article 4/1 of the Swiss Copyright Act, this aspect is irrelevant for European legislation which provides a sui generis right for databases based on substantial investment in the obtaining, verification or presentation of data (Art. 7/1 Directive 96/9/EC). However, individual data, lacking original expression and not related to identifiable persons (which are then subject to data protection laws), remain unowned and devoid of intellectual or civil property rights.

i. Software

International copyright protection applies to a computer program when its source code is deemed a literary and artistic work under article 2 of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, necessitating the required level of originality. Software is safeguarded accordingly in Europe by Directive 2009/24/EC and in Switzerland by art. 2 para 3 CopA. The Swiss doctrine defines software (which is subject to varying interpretations) by referring to the U.S. Copyright Act, whose §101 states that «A computer program is a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result». Copyright protects the expression, not the idea, allowing different expressions with the same output without infringing on each other. Proprietary licences or open licences, like Creative Commons or Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) licences, govern a computer program, offering different levels of user freedom and accessibility. A computer program may also be patentable if it introduces a technical innovation.

j. Design

Copyright covers drawings and visuals as artistic creations, when the conditions aforementioned are fulfilled. Therefore, when it comes to design, what copyright protects is the visual representation itself, rather than the object depicted in it. The shape of an object per se, if presenting a new and original exterior appearance, can be registered in the Design Register for design protection according to the Federal Act on the Protection of Designs.

k. Audiovisuals, theatre, films and multimedia

Copyright protects any text, sheet music, script, drawing, image, visual, set design, costumes, architectural buildings etc. produced for theatre plays, audiovisual, films and multimedia; related rights protect the recording in a fixed medium, the performance by actors, singers, musicians etc. as well as the producer’s contribution to the recording on a medium capable of public communication.

Copyright also protects each audiovisual, theatre film and multimedia work as a whole.

1.2.3. Get familiar with the Creative Commons licences

a. What are CC licences?

Creative Commons (CC) licences promote the sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge by integrating the default "all rights reserved" with the "some rights reserved" approach to copyright, thus enabling right holders (licensors) to release some of the rights that are granted by copyright law. CC licences authorise others (licensees) to use, share and modify licensors' creative works and clearly define the conditions for such reuse.

These are their main characteristics:

• CC licences are free of charge and can be used for any type of copyrighted work (including research data, educational resources, scientific publications, music, pictures, databases, sound, video, etc), except for software.
• They are non-revocable: licensors are not allowed to change towards a more restrictive licence as this would break the whole system. However, licensors are always allowed to change the licence to a less restrictive one, as this change does not create any troubles with previous work usage.
• CC licences are non-exclusive, meaning creators and owners can enter various licensing arrangements for the same work at any time. This property is, at times, referred to as dual licensing.
• While permitting reusers to copy, modify and distribute their work, creators retain the copyright and their right to be credited.

b. What is the relationship between CC licences and copyright?

CC licences are built within copyright law. As such, they can be applied only to copyrightable works by the right holder and not to works included in the worldwide public domain. Other types of intellectual property, like patents and trademarks, are not covered by CC licences. CC licences do not limit or suppress any rights granted under the exceptions and limitations to copyright (e.g., related to uses for purposes of criticism, parody, access for the visually impaired, and more). They work internationally and have the same lifespan as copyright.

c. How are CC licences designed?

CC licences have a three layers design:

• the lawyer-readable layer is written in legal code and lists all terms and conditions in a way that can be enforced in court;
• the human-readable layer is a summary in plain language of legal terms and conditions;
• the "machine-readable" layer is written in a format that can be understood by search engines, software and other kinds of technology. This way, it's easy for the Web to know when a work is available under a CC licence.

d. What are the CC licensing options?

CC licences result from a combination of one or more of the following four elements:

Icon	Right	Description	Open
	BY = Attribution	The author (who may not be identical to the right holder) must be credited. All six CC licences resulting from the combination of the four elements listed here include this condition.	√
	SA = Share Alike	Remix, adapt, or build upon the material is allowed, but you must licence the modified material under identical terms.	√
	ND = No-Derivatives	Adaptations of the work are permitted, but their sharing is not.
	NC = Non-Commercial	Commercial use of the work is not allowed.

Icons by Creative Commons are trademarked

e. CC licences and the public domain

Creative Commons also offers two public domain options:

Button	Name and Abbreviation	Description	Open
	CC0 = Zero	If you want to dedicate your work to the public domain, you can use CC0. Legally, it has a different status depending on jurisdictions: designed as a waiver of copyright (it works as such in the US, for example, where it is consequently not a licence), in some countries like Switzerland and the EU member states where creators are not allowed to renounce their moral rights CC0 is technically a licence, through which you declare that you will tolerate any kind of (re)use, unconditionally, for any purpose and worldwide. Attribution is not mandatory for CC0, although including the author is always good practice.	√
	Public Domain Mark	This mark informs the public about the public domain status of a work. It does not have a legal effect and is used to signal that a work is free of all copyright restrictions.	√

The CC0 and Public domain marks by Creative Commons are trademarked

f. Open versus non-open CC licences

According to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, «all users should have a free, irrevocable, worldwide right of access and permission to copy, use, distribute, (...), make and distribute derivative works in any digital medium, for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship». Therefore, only CC0, CC BY, and CC BY-SA align with such a definition.

The main decisions that a licensor must take when choosing a CC licence are:

• Do I want to allow commercial use?
• Do I want to allow derivative works?
• If so, do I want the adaptations to be shared under identical terms?

Depending on the answers, the licensor can choose among seven different licence options. The Creative Commons licence spectrum can guide you through them:

VISUAL:
10. Adapted from The Creative Commons license spectrum by Shaddim, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0; CC buttons by Creative Commons

g. CC licence suite versions

The number that follows the CC licences' names indicates their version. The nr. 4.0, currently in use, is their latest: compared to the previous ones, that were adapted to national legislations, version 4.0 licences have international value. Creative Commons is now addressing the issues raised by the fast spreading use of generative artificial intelligence tools and will eventually release a new licence suite that considers AI integration too. We advise to either use the latest version of the licence or to substitute the number with "all".  

h. What if someone does something with your CC-licensed work you disagree with?

As long as users comply with the terms and conditions of the CC licence, you cannot control how your material is used. But you can always disconnect your name from usages that you don't like by waiving the attribution requirement and asking that the licensee remove the attribution information. Also remember that anyone modifying your cc licensed work must indicate that the original material has been modified. In so doing, any changes made to your original material cannot be attributed to you.

1.3. Recommendations for the licence notice

As you go along reading these guidelines you will learn more about how to apply the Creative Commons licences. Here are a few general recommendations to keep in mind:  

• always attribute works even when not formally required, e.g., when the work is in CC0 or in the public domain. Citing sources and acknowledging the work of authors and institutions is a tenet of research ethics and integrity, and important for valuing everyone's work;
• to facilitate reuse, always indicate the terms of use of your data, even when the content is not copyrighted or is in the public domain. In the latter cases, use the CC0 licence or the public domain mark;
• include licences correctly: link the licence text and the licence metadata that provides information about the licence itself and the attribution details in all documents and websites you produce.  

2. PLAN an open approach to research

You have to plan for your research with sharing and afterlife in mind. The Data Management Plan is your blueprint.

2.1. What is a Data Management Plan and why you should produce one

A Data Management Plan (DMP, at times also called Research Data Plan) is a formal document that concisely outlines the life cycle of your data, clarifying the principles and the means you plan to adopt to collect, manage, store and potentially share your data during and after a research project. It is usually short and written in plain language, so that anybody can understand it. It is a living document, adjusted as needed throughout your research.

A Data Management Plan involves extra work, but its benefits outweigh the inconvenience:

• it is often a requirement of academic and research institutions, publishers and funding institutions;
• it establishes clear workflows and guidelines surrounding data management: what file formats you use, how you organise your folders and how you name your files are decisions that you should take early on;
• it allows you to identify and plan for the resources, tools and expertise needed for data management;
• it maintains the data underlying publications, allowing for transparency and validation of results;
• it allows anybody to understand, find and reuse your research data at any time, making it future-proof. This is important for new team members who may join the project at a later stage, for researchers who may generate new projects building on your work, and for yourself: revisiting data at a later stage can can be difficult;
• in the long run it reduces the administration burden on yourself;
• it ensures the longevity of your research: publications date faster than data.

2.2. Key ingredients of a Data Management Plan

Before we proceed, it is important that you familiarise with some terms that are key to data management.

2.2.1. Research data

Data is a tricky word, it makes you think of quantifiable information. But in the context of data management all materials and assets scholars collect, generate and use during all stages of their research cycle are data, e.g., archival notes, a timeline, a spreadsheet with a listing of historical events, photos, an annotated bibliography, the video recording of interviews and their transcriptions and translations, a research website… If you develop or customise software code, algorithms, and protocols to answer your research questions these are also considered research data (otherwise simply tools).

Publications are not typically counted as data in a STEM research Data Management Plan, only the data included in them are. In the humanities, though, publications per se are often very important research inputs. For example, they might be used as an argument for your research: in such cases it is useful to record them as data.

To be openly accessible your data should be digitised, including for example your handwritten archival notes. When this is not possible (e.g., a performance) a digital description of it will do (e.g., recording and textual description of it).

2.2.2. Metadata, Readme file and controlled vocabulary

a. Metadata

For your research outputs to be openly accessible you need to develop a documentation that enables others (and your future self) to discover, use, and make sense of them. Metadata plays a crucial role in this: it is data about data. In the context of data management, it is structured information which describes characteristics of data such as content, quality, format, temporal and spatial coverage, and legal status. Most repositories require a minimum set of metadata, and they may have a standard template for you to compile. If this is not the case and you have to do it yourself, you can check for example the metadata required by Zenodo, a general-purpose open repository developed in Europe and operated by CERN.

Metadata is not only meant for humans, it is designed to be machine-readable too: its quality influences how effectively your data can be found and potentially reused. It should be rich, meaningful and standardised as much as possible. To this purpose you should structure your metadata according to metadata standards and adopt a controlled vocabulary.

b. Metadata standards

Metadata standards provide specific data fields to be used in describing data. Look up the directory for disciplinary metadata standards, if you can't find a suitable one, use a generic metadata schema such as Dublin Core or the DataCite Metadata Schema.

c. Controlled vocabularies

Adopting a controlled vocabulary for your metadata ensures that the terms you use to describe your data are consistent and, if possible, in use by other scholars as well: check whether some of the general topics and terms (persons, locations, concepts) that you focus on have already been assigned persistent identifiers or a URIs (→ 2.2.3.) in one of the ontologies that are relevant for your field. You can build upon existing controlled vocabularies if the terms or words that you need are not there.

Controlled vocabularies also provide a consistent way of dealing with uncertainty, which you often encounter in humanities research. They do so by offering a standardised approach to the indeterminate or unknown, e.g., using words such as "circa" for uncertain dates and terms such as "anonymous" for uncertainty regarding authorship.

Useful links:

• The Library of Congress Subject Headings;
• AAT, Art and Architecture Thesaurus, which also indexes topics depicted in art and material culture in general
• Getty Union List of Artists Names – ULAN
• BARTOC, the Basel Register of Thesauri, Ontologies & Classifications

d. Batch metadata

You should collect batches of discovery metadata to form the basis of the repository object using a template for each data deposit. The template could be provided by your chosen repository: e.g., the Digital Repository of Ireland uses this Batch Metadata Template; the Dublin Core Metadata Generator is another useful resource.

Try to put the metadata in the template as you go along rather than doing so at the end of your project, when you're pressed for time.

e. Readme file

Any logical cluster of data you collect or produce (like a collection of photographs or a spreadsheet) as well as your final paper has to be accompanied by a file in plain text that describes it and that should be stored together with it: the Readme file. It contains metadata and information such as:

• the title of the dataset, creators, dates, keywords, funding sources
• a description of what data each filename contains
• methods for data collection/generation/curation
• a list of all the column names used in a spreadsheet
• explanations of abbreviations

This file becomes part of your documentation. The Guide to writing "readme" style metadata can support you: take it and adapt it.

2.2.3. Persistent Identifiers and PID graphs

A Persistent Identifier (PID) is a long-lasting reference to a digital object that ensures the digital object will be findable in the future even if its associated URL changes over time. Digital objects include your identity as a content creator, publications and other research outputs, organisations and funding bodies.

PIDs and the metadata associated with them are both visible to machines and humans and help them describe the type of resource, where to find it, and how to reuse it. Thanks to PIDs we can persistently link articles with the underlying data, software and funding information across the research lifecycle to support research reproducibility and maintain the footprint for each output over all its versions.

a. ORCID ID

In academia, the Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID) is the most widely used ID. Once you register on ORCID and have your ID, all information (CV, grants, publications, projects and institutions you are involved in…) you enter into your profile becomes visible without having to copy them to different platforms and sheets. Adding your ORCID to your publications and datasets, email signature, applications and other academic works immediately and semantically connect them. This information can be exchanged effectively across databases, across countries and across academic disciplines; it is the de facto standard when submitting a research article or grant application, or depositing research data.

Your ORCID follows you no matter if you change your name or move to a different organisation, discipline, or country. And you do not need to hold an academic position to create and keep it: participating in research, scholarship, or innovation is enough.

To learn more about how having an ORCID ID can make your life easier, read Alice Meadow’s blog post Six Things to Do Now You've Got an ORCID iD.

b. Pid graphs

One of the most powerful aspect of PIDs are PID graphs, which enable persistent and machine-readable linking of different entities, expressing relationships within the research landscape, such as: linking publications with underlying datasets, source materials, software or other relevant digital output; linking a dataset to documentation describing how the dataset was collected; linking authors to their publications (via ORCID IDs) or research funders to the projects or output they are funding. Or even all at once!

c. Overview of commonly used PIDs with examples

Abbreviation	Description	Typical content type	Where to get it	Example
ORCID ID	Your ORCID iD is a unique, open digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher with the same or a similar name to you.	Persons	From ORCID	https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7794-0218
DOI	A DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a digital identifier for objects (whether digital, physical or abstract) which can be assigned by organisations in membership of one of the DOI Registration Agencies; the two best known ones are CrossRef, for journal articles and some other scholarly publications, and DataCite for a wide range of data objects including physical samples  DOI has a system infrastructure to ensure a URL resolves to the correct location for that object.	Most typically for research articles and books, but also other digital content types	1. From publishers with CrossRef or DataCite membership 2. From institutional libraries who have DataCite membership 3. From data repositories	Paper: https://doi.org/10.3390/app12052426 Book: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0192 Book chapter: https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0192.05 Data set: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3893546
ARK	ARK (Archival Resource Key) is an identifier scheme conceived by the California Digital Library (CDL), aiming to identify objects in a persistent way and  widely used by libraries, data centres, archives, museums, publishers, and government agencies.	Archival resources, datasets at all levels of granularity (large collections vs. pieces of a single document)	From repositories. DaSCH also uses ARKs as PIDs. To implement an ARK system, contact the California Digital Library (CDL).	Data set: http://ark.dasch.swiss/ark:/72163/1/081C
HDL	Handles are unique and persistent identifiers for Internet resources, with a central registry to resolve URLs to the current location. Each Handle identifies a single resource and the organisation which created or now maintains the resource. The Handle system also underpins the technical infrastructure of DOIs, which are a special type of Handles.	Data sets (finished or unfinished) and other digital scholarly objects	From repositories or to implement a handle system, directly from the Handle.Net Registry	https://hdl.handle.net/11378/0000-000B-BE89-5
Wikidata ID	Wikidata are used for both internal organisation of the Wikimedia projects knowledge base and for their connection to other databases. Each Wikidata entity is identified by an entity ID, which is prefixed with Q (e.g., Q12345 ), properties are prefixed by P (e.g., P569 ) and lexemes are prefixed by L (e.g., L1 ).	Entities, properties, lexeme	Wikidata	https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15

The overview above does not include other PIDs types that are primarily used by the library and archival domain such as URNs, PURLs, VIAF IDs, or PIDs that are specifically designed for one repository such as arxiv ID or idHal.

Useful links:

• FREYA - Connected Open Identifiers for Discovery, Access and Use of Research Resources offers a detailed guide with decision trees to select PIDs for different content types with different budgets
• Handbook by the Digital Preservation Coalition
• A PID Forum where you can post PID-related questions

2.2.4. Open file formats

Open file formats are easily accessible and preservation friendly formats without legal or technical restrictions, that is, they do not require proprietary software, hardware, or purchase of a commercial licence. They are compatible with both proprietary and free or open source software, and preservation friendly.

Even if you work in proprietary environments, such as InDesign, Atlas.it or MaxQDA, at the end of your workflow, you always have the chance and are advised to convert the outcomes to open file formats, which can be easily shared are generally more stable over time - still an easier task than building a time machine!

Useful links:

• The Preservation guide by OpenAIRE, a non-profit Partnership of 50 organisations to support European research through a permanent open scholarly communication infrastructure, sums up the preferable file formats in an overview chart. The chart is in line with the Library of Congress Recommended Formats Statements
• The Dutch Data Archiving and Network Solution (DANS) lists preferred formats providing further information on each one (for instance, explaining in what cases a .jpg file is suitable for long-term preservation and when not)  
• The list of file formats for archiving by ETH, with instructions on how to prepare your files
• The UK Data Service also recommends file formats for long-term preservation

2.3. Principles: be FAIR

The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship have been developed to foster access to scientific data in a context where volume, complexity, and creation speed of data is increasing and where data has to be readable by both humans and machines. Since 2016 the FAIR principles have become a standard reference in open science. Your approach to data management and your DMP should adhere to these principles as much as possible.

FAIR is an acronym, we can break it down as follows:

• Findable = use persistent identifiers (all your research outputs need a DOI!); use rich, accurate, relevant and consistent metadata organised according to standard metadata schemes: this will ensure your data is discoverable online. Also, specify if and how data are linked to other data and publications.
• Accessible = use standard protocols (usually, https or ftp) and deposit your data in indexable repositories (that is, discoverable by search engines crawlers). Your data should be as open as possible, as closed as necessary: if an authentication and authorisation process is needed to access your data, make sure to provide indications on how to access it.
• Interoperable = use controlled vocabularies and metadata standards that can be queried and indexed by other information systems, and represent your data and metadata through a formal, accessible and broadly applicable language: the ideal solution are open formats, if not possible, use largely deployed proprietary formats.
• Reusable = document your data so that others can interpret it correctly, including contextual information about how the data has been gathered and processed; adopt licences that allow reuse and remix and clearly indicate permitted reuse and rights holder; indicate a contact person. Make sure this information is in plain text: your metadata should be accessible even when the data is not (any more).

When you ingest your research outputs in an open repository the latter will guide you through the process ensuring your outputs align with the FAIR principles.

Ultimately, what you are aiming for, is a FAIR-compliant open access publication of your work (→ 6.). The Open Access Barometer highlights the level of compliance of the most commonly available publishing routes:

	Description	Level of accessibility	Is it FAIR?
Open Access	Content is accessible for free without restrictions or registration with an open licence (CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA)	Immediate and unlimited Open Access	Yes
	Content is accessible for free without restrictions or registration with a licence which does not allow commercial use nor derivative works (CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-NC-ND)	Immediate Access with limitations regarding reuse	Yes
Free access	Content is accessible online for free but without a standard open licence (e.g., Creative Commons), reuse conditions unspecified	Fake open access	No
	Content is accessible online after a registration	Not fully open	Depending on whether licensing information is clear, depending on hosting circumstances
Delayed open access	Content is archived inside the institutional repository and made public after maximum 6 months (embargo)	Not fully open	Yes
Closed access	Content is archived inside the institutional repository with limited access	Closed access with clearly defined access conditions and authorization mechanisms	Yes
	Content is securely stored on institutional servers with limited access. FAIR data are present Data is private and cannot be shared	Not open	No

Useful links:

• FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific management and stewardship: this is the official FAIR website
• An explanation of the FAIR principles by the SNSF, summarised in plain language and with an overview of your duties as a researcher  
• An essential guide to FAIR research by Library Carpentry, which provides learning tools to librarians and information-related communities
• Check if your research data is FAIR:
  • through a questionnaire with NFDI4Culture FAIR Check or the ARDC FAIR data self assessment tool
  • automatically through a web service with F-UJI

2.3.1. Take extra CARE

The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance complement the FAIR principles adding a layer of respect towards indigenous people whenever your research makes use of their data and knowledge. CARE stands for Collective benefit, Authority of control, Responsibility and Ethics: as a researcher you should share how you intend to use data involving indigenous people (as collectives and individuals) and their territories, having their rights and interests in mind and empowering them to self-determine how the data is being used.

Local Contexts, a project that has been advocating for the sovereignty of indigenous data since 2010, has created tools to ground intellectual and cultural property rights related to data, cultural heritage, and genetic resources within digital environments: these are, on the one hand, Notices, intended for institutions and researchers who commit to uphold indigenous rights and promote the visibility and recognition of their knowledge and heritage, and, on the other hand, Labels, intended for indigenous communities to indicate how their knowledge and heritage should be managed. Through these tools, Local Contexts aims to circumvent the limitations imposed by copyright laws, which emerged in colonial times and do not protect indigenous (nor traditional) knowledge.    

While the main concern that inspired the CARE principles was to remedy to and prevent further exploitation of indigenous people, consider looking at them more broadly: a CARE approach implies that you're aware of power dynamics and of your ethical responsibilities as a researcher towards people you get involved in your work overall. It promotes respectful relation-building processes. It also means considering differences across cultures: for instance, in some countries society as a whole matters more than communities.

Useful link: Webinar on the Care Principles and Local Contexts's Labels and Notices Brigitte Vézina – Open Access to cultural heritage: Ethical issues

2.4. Develop your Data Management Plan

To get into the right mindset, think of what makes it easy for you to collect data: you want to make sure that your data has that kind of quality and accompanying information. Some questions that might help you are:

• which factors helped discoverability?
• how were you able to access the data?
• what made you trust the creators?
• where limitations like incompleteness or uncertainties indicated? How?
• in what way did your research methods affect data collection?
• and the other way around: how did the data collection affect your methodology?

Useful link: Webinar on how to design a Data Management Plan in the humanities by Deborah Thorpe

2.4.1. Data management plan's structure: the basics

There are different ways of structuring a Data Management plan. Your funder or the institution you work for might require a specific format – such is the case for  the SNSF and many Swiss universities. Let's take a quick look at the main areas covered by all DMPs.

Begin by providing a synthetic description of your research project, its focus, and purpose. In this introductory part consider summarising overarching information, e.g., general principles and policies that you are going to adopt.

Then build a table!

a. Data collection and documentation

In this section you should describe your datasets and for each one specify:

• whether the data is being collected, observed, generated by you or reused; their content and their source; the file formats (both raw and curated); the estimated volume. Remember that in the realm of arts, design, and music publications might be considered research data as well; so are software, code, algorithms, and protocols if you customise or develop them;
• the methodologies, standards and quality assurance processes that you intend to apply. You should explain how you will organise your data (naming conventions, versioning) and what kind of documentation you will produce to make your data understandable to humans and machines (Readme files, metadata standards etc.).

Here are some tips to ensure the quality of your data:

• map and document your workflow from the point of collection to the final format dataset: this will help others (and yourself at a later stage) understand how you got there with your data;
• standardise data capture, data entry and recording methods;
• create and maintain well organised folder structures and document the criteria you used;
• choose meaningful but brief names for your files and folders from the onset and define naming criteria;
• ensure your actions are reversible:
  • make your raw data "read only"
  • save modified files with a new name with the version number (not final, final-final…);
• be as specific as you can about the exact version of a software you used;
• apply some strategies to improve the accuracy of your data like:
  • using the available data validation functions in your software (e.g., Excel allows you to specify permitted values for a cell or range of cells)
  • checking your transcripts, especially if you are using a transcription service;

You may find this catalogue of problems in research data focusing on material cultural objects and related data models useful.

b. Ethical and legal compliance

Seek advice within your university as each has different requirements.

The main questions you have to address here are:

• how will you manage ethical issues? Be very clear on how you will handle sensitive personal information, e.g., if you will need to get consent from participants for preservation and sharing, or if the identity of some participants needs protection and how you will make sure this happens. These procedures, too, need to be established at the beginning;
• how will you manage copyright and intellectual property rights issues? You have to provide details on what licences you will apply and whether there are any restrictions on reuse of third party data.

c. Data storage and preservation

This part is also strongly institution oriented, so check your university’s storage policies, facilities and advice first.

The purpose of this section is to detail for each datasets how you intend to manage your data during the active research phase and later for long-term preservation:

• list the solutions that you will adopt to store and back up data during the research, also specifying, if relevant, how you will manage data security and personal data protection;
• indicate what criteria you'll use to decide what data to preserve, what data curation procedures you're planning, where and for how long you want to preserve them.  

d. Data sharing and reuse

Sharing here is to be understood as publishing and disseminating:

• indicate which data(sets) you plan to publish where, and how you plan to ensure their discoverability;
• any legal and ethical restriction or contractual clause affecting accessibility should be highlighted as well.

For data that you have reused, provide a data availability statement that indicates where the data is located and how it can be accessed. The same applies for data that you have accessed but which you will not be sharing in a repository, like materials from an archival collection. Include this information in your reference list.

e. Roles and Responsibilities

Who in your team is responsible for data management and sharing? If you haven't provided this information yet, you can dedicate a section of your DMP to it. It's also useful to think about any kind of support and training that team members might need.

f. Budgeting

Management, publication, communication and long-term preservation of project outputs come with specific costs, for which it is advised to plan in advance. For example, ask yourself:

• will you need storage for large volumes of data?
• if you communicate your results on your website, who is hosting it, for how long, and how much does it cost? How are you going to cover these expenses?

The required effort in terms of manpower and working hours is just as important:

• can you estimate how much time is required for documentation, data cleaning and anonymisation to enable data sharing? Is there any available personnel for this purpose?
• also think about the post-project funding period: is there a contact person who remains responsible for a given service or for running a website, or an editorial team around the outputs of the project? If so, how will they be compensated or incentivised? How much institutional staff (e.g., repository managers) can take over from such sustainability efforts?

Useful links:

• This presentation guides you through the cost estimation of DMPs
• EPFL Library developed a Cost Calculator for Data Management

2.4.2. Recommendations

• You need to establish your sharing rights as soon as possible for both the data that you reuse (e.g., while at the archive, or otherwise accessing third party materials) and the data that you produce (e.g., while carrying out an interview).
• Systematically ask yourself whether there are any sensitivities in the data (personal data or otherwise protected data) and how you will handle that.
• Capture the information needed to understand the context and the processes leading to the creation of your datasets - that is, how your data has been "cooked". This will enable their accessibility and reusability in the long term.
• Use persistent identifiers wherever possible: particularly, don't forget to mention your Orcid ID (not just your name & email) and to include DOIs for your research outputs.
• Be aware that reconstructing FAIR relevant documentation of finished data sets is virtually impossible.

A few more tips:

• Avoid the extensive use of discipline specific jargon: your DMP should be easily understood by anyone;
• provide clarification for any acronyms used;
• do not leave sections or questions blank;
• provide rationale for decisions made;
• the active involvement of all the project partners is key in a successful implementation of the DMP;
• in the early versions of your Data Management Plan don't worry about uncertainties and decisions to be made later: just indicate them.

Useful links:

• SNSF (→ 2.5.1.) and Horizon Europe (→ 2.5.2.) provide their own DMP templates and guidance, but you can also build your own Data management plan with these tools: ARGOS or DMP Online
• Forschungsdaten.info is a website dedicated to data management in German speaking countries; resources dedicated to Switzerland are mainly made available in English
• Examples of DMPs

2.5. Data Management Plan as a funding requirement

2.5.1. In Switzerland

Since October 2017, the submission of a data management plan (DMP) is mandatory in most funding instruments. The SNSF's DMP is relatively short: its expected length is about 2-3 pages. Applicants to SNSF funding can request funding for the preparation of research data in view of its archiving and for the archiving itself in data repositories complying with the FAIR data principles and that do not serve any commercial purposes: this request can only be made at the time of the application submission.

Useful links:

• SNSF's page on Open Research Data [en, de, fr]
• SNSF's guidance on DMP, with links to its template [en, de, fr]
• SNSF's video support to DMP, broken down section by section
• The SNSF Template with examples by the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Library, Geneva Graduate Institute

National data support services in Switzerland:

• DaSCH (Swiss National Data & Service Center for the Humanities) is the coordinating institution and representative of Switzerland in  DARIAH ERIC, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities European Research Infrastructure Consortium. It provides training and advice for research data management as well as a long-term repository and a generic virtual research environment for open research data in the humanities in Switzerland.
• FORS is the Swiss centre of expertise in the social sciences, offering support around data collection and analysis, data management, and a research data repository.

2.5.2. Horizon Europe  

Horizon Europe requires beneficiaries to make scientific publications freely available online, immediately upon publication and with no restrictions on use, by depositing them on a trusted repository. Horizon Europe also strongly encourages the dissemination of research data according to FAIR principles. The quality and appropriateness of open science practices are key criteria in the evaluation process of applications and are evaluated as part of the project’s methodology. Horizon Europe also recognises and rewards the participation of citizens and end users.

A DMP is mandatory for any Horizon Europe project generating or reusing research data and should be submitted from the proposal stage. A full DMP should be ready by the signature of the grant agreement at the latest.

Useful links:

• Open Science Europe, the open access publishing venue for European Commission-funded researchers across all disciplines
• How to comply with Horizon Europe mandate for Research Data Management, from the series of Guides for Researchers by OpenAire
• Template

3. ACCESS and (RE)USE third parties data

All research projects start with data that you need to find and access. Open data, that is data licensed under an open licence or in the public domain, can be freely accessed without researchers or their institutions having to pay for it. They are reusable according to the distribution licence picked by their author and/or the publisher.

This section of the guidelines describes how to access and reuse them.

3.1. Open repositories for arts, design, and music

Start your search for open-access and free resources in open repositories, that is repositories that are non-commercial and allow FAIR data publishing and reuse. The following subsections list a selection of arts, design, and music dedicated resources: check Re3data, the Registry of Research Data Repositories, and OpenDOAR, the quality-assured, global Directory of Open Access Repositories, for more.

3.1.1. Repositories of research data

• OpenAire's Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage community, a discovery environment building an open scholarly graph of publications, datasets, software and other types of research products, all linked to each other and to fundings, projects and organisations
• The Swiss National Data and Service Center for the Humanities (DaSCH)
• The Digital Library in the TextGrid Repository, a repository for texts and manuscripts (images and transcriptions)
• Archivegrid describes source materials held in archives, libraries, museums and historical societies, bringing together information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more.

3.1.2. Repositories of art

Repositories for art works (in general)

• Europeana
• Archives Portal Europe
• Wikipedia:GLAM
• WorldCat
• VIAF
• Digital Repository Ireland
• Datasets – Digital Humanities 201
• Collection Catalogues - Rijksmuseum
• Open Access at the National Gallery of Art
• Gallica

Repositories for images

• Getty Provenance Index
• PHAROS
• Open Content Program | Getty Projects
• Public Art Archive

3.1.3. Repositories of design projects

• Thingiverse is an open repository for 3D printable things. All designs are encouraged to be licensed under a Creative Commons licence
• Build upon and contribute to public projects shared on Wikifactory
• Arduino is an open-source software and hardware company specialised in microcontrollers. You are free to use Arduino's bricks for your project but be careful: the brand name is copyrighted and exclusive to official products, so you need permission to label your project with it.  

3.1.4. Repositories of music

Catalogues (collections of databases):

• The musoW database brings together openly available music and musicology resources from across the Internet. It serves as a catalogue of databases. You can browse it along different search criteria.
• You can use the Audio, Video search of the ProQuest database

Databases, collections (a small selection of MusoW resources):

• List of Public Domain Music
• MusOpen for free sheets
• ChoralWiki, a Choral Public Domain Library
• Early Music Online

Open-upon-request music resources from proprietary providers

• Deezer (API)
• Spotify data-sets

3.1.5. Repositories of software

• European list of a number of repositories: OSS Repositories | Joinup
• Possibly the most established directory: Free Software Directory

Repositories for specific operating system:

• Debian: https://packages.debian.org/stable/
• Ubuntu: https://packages.ubuntu.com/jammy/

The Free Software Foundation Europe provides assistance, information and expertise on Free Software: Contact - FSFE

3.1.6. Open hardware

Projects using Cern open hardware licence are listed here. In their Wiki homepage you can learn about other open hardware licences and connected projects.

3.1.7. Fonts

Open science requires all components to be freely accessible and shareable, including fonts. The most widely used open licence font is the SIL Open Font Licence (Ofl). On their website you can find selected resources for inspiration and download options. Should you use the Google Font library, it is recommended to download the fonts and not use them directly from Google on your output (e.g., a website) to avoid Google tracking.  

Among the open fonts we can suggest:

• Alegreya serif and Alegreya Sans. With small-caps. Cyrillic, Greek. OFL.
• Andada. Site
• Cascadia: monospaced by Microsoft. Wikipedia.
• Charis by SIL. Based on Bitstream Charter. (Download Charter.) Cyrillic. OFL.
• Cooper Hewitt: sans-serif. OFL.
• Cousine: monospaced. Also Liberation Mono. Cyrillic, Greek. Apache.
• Fira Sans and Fira Mono (or Fira Code) and FiraGO: sans-serif (with condensed) and monospaced, for Mozilla, by Erik Spiekermann et al. Similar to FF Meta. Good for UI. W, A review. Cyrillic, Greek, Math. OFL.
• Gentium by SIL. Wikipedia. Cyrillic, Greek. OFL.
• IBM Plex Sans, Serif and Mono ★★★★: for IBM. Repo. Wikipedia. Cyrillic, Greek, Japanese, Korean. OFL.
• Inconsolata: monospaced. Git or Git, [G], [W]. OFL.
• Inter: sans-serif, for Figma, by Rasmus Andersson. 
Repo. Google Fonts. Cyrillic, Greek. An ode.
• JetBrains Mono: monospaced. Cyrillic, Greek
• JuliaMono: monospaced. Math.
• Lekton: monospaced
• Literata: legible serif for Google Books by TypeTogether ★★★☆. Site. Wikipedia. (Kindle has Bookerly.) Cyrillic, Greek. OFL.
• Merriweather: semi-serif. Cyrillic.
• Noto: multilanguage superfamily for Google ... Wikipedia. Google Fonts. Repo. Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, ... OFL.
• Overpass and Mono: for Red Hat. Wikipedia. Cyrillic
• Piazzolla: serif. Site. Cyrillic, Greek
• Roboto: system sans-serif for Google Android. (Apple has San Francisco.) Cyrillic, Greek.
• Source Sans, Source Serif and Source Mono: by Adobe. Cyrillic, Greek
• Spectral: for Goole Docs. Google Fonts. Cyrillic. OFL.
• STIX Two Text: serif with math. Wikipedia. Cyrillic, Greek
• Ubuntu Sans and Ubuntu Mono: system sans-serif font for Ubuntu. Wikipedia. Cyrillic, Greek
• Work Sans. OFL.

3.2. Reuse Creative Commons licensed works

To reuse CC-licensed materials you must follow the licence conditions:

• if the work you are using is licensed under one of the three Creative Commons licences that includes the NC-NonCommercial restriction, you cannot use it for a commercial purpose. Whether a use is commercial or not depends on the situation and intentions of the user;
• if the original work you want to use is licensed under a ND-NoDerivatives licence, you can make and use changes but only privately: sharing your adaptation with others is not allowed;
• if the original work you want to use is licensed under a SA-ShareAlike licence, then you must licence your adaptation under the same or a compatible licence.

To learn how to mark your research outputs with a CC-licence notice go to section 4.4.2.

3.2.1. Adapt and remix of CC-licensed works

In case of adaptation and remixes of content you can use the CC Adapter’s Licence that applies to your own original contribution. When choosing a licence for your new work, it's recommended to choose one of the licences indicated in the green boxes of the following table:

VISUAL:
11. Adapted from the "CC Adapter's License Chart" by Creative Commons, CC BY 4.0

If you create an adaptation or remix of differently licensed works, you must choose a compatible licence, as some items cannot be remixed depending on the licence they have. The following remix table helps you determine what licences can be used together: if there is a green check mark in the box where row (licence of original work 1) and column (licence of original work 2) intersect then you can go ahead and mix the two licences.

VISUAL:
12. Adapted from the "CC License Compatibility Chart" by Kennisland, CC0

3.2.3. CC-licences attribution requirements

Once you've found and reused open third parties’ material there is one thing you should never forget to do: cite your sources, and cite them properly. In doing so you not only avoid plagiarism, but promote scholarly transparency.

Attribution is required by all CC licences. Although it is not mandatory for CC0, it is always good scientific practice to credit the author. A proper attribution follows the TASL rule and includes the following information:

T	Title	Title of the work. If you're reusing an original work with no title, you can skip this. Starting with the CC licence suite 4.0 the title is not mandatory any more
A	Author	Licensor's name, who's usually the author of the work
S	Source	A link to or notice regarding where the work can be found, preferably the original source. Avoid shortened URLs
L	Licence	The specific Creative Commons licence you’ve chosen for your work, including the version of the licence. Make sure to link (or provide other directions that guide users) to the licence's legal code.

If you lack some of the TASL information, include as much detail as possible in the attribution statement.

In case of derivative works, you should indicate your work is a modification or an adaptation of another work and provide attribution to the creator of the original work. Include a link to the work you modified and indicate its licence too.

If a work has undergone multiple adaptations, be reasonable, e.g., making sure it is possible to track the original work and the last adaptation you relied on.

Useful link: Recommended practices for attribution, a wiki page by Creative Commons, gives you indications and examples.

3.3. Collaboration with GLAMs

GLAMs (acronym for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) are cultural institutions that collect and maintain cultural heritage materials in the public interest and are a primary resource of open digital content. The type of content shared by GLAMs include: works in the public domain, works under copyright whose authors’ gave permission to share, works of which GLAMs’ own the copyright, and metadata produced by GLAMs.

Not all cultural institutions have a clear commitment to open access. Some lack the knowledge, some the resources to pursue it. This may result in some confusion when it comes to accessing and reusing their content. Establishing a good relationship with them is a way to facilitate your work and promote the principles of open access.

When working with GLAM it is good practice to:

• contact the cultural heritage institutions during the initial stage of your project in order to explain your plans and figure out details of the transaction together;
• clear identification of goals and ways in which they want you to publish, store, licence and attribute the output of the collaborative research project
• agree on the distributing responsibilities among stakeholders
• the mutual agreements between you and GLAMs and the data reuse declarations are going to be a powerful component in your Data Management Plan.

Useful links:

• The Heritage Data Reuse Charter by DARIAH-EU facilitates the collaboration between cultural heritage institutions and researchers by providing exchange protocols. The charter is a moral contract all stakeholders must adhere to. Its core principles are: reciprocity, interoperability, citability, openness, stewardship, and trustworthiness. The charter consists of a number of principles and mechanisms for improving the conditions for use and reuse of cultural heritage data issued by cultural heritage institutions and studied and enriched by researchers.
• The Reuse agreement template between Cultural Heritage Institutions and researchers can help you, and the GLAM you are collaborating with, clarify your mutual goals, specify access to data, provenance information, preferred citation standards, hosting responsibilities in order to reach a mutual reuse agreement, right from the project planning/application phase.
• Some GLAMs data are uploaded on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, Europeana, Flickr Commons, Openverse and the Internet Archive.

3.4. Reuse content that is not openly available

In arts, design, and music the probability of having no other choice but (re)using content that is not openly available is high. In this case you need to identify all ingredients that make up that content and ask each rights holder for permission to reuse. Ideally, you should consider convincing the rights holders to release their content under an open licence (CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA → 1.2.3.f.). If your attempt doesn't work, you have the following last resort options: chose more restrictive CC licences (NonCommercial, Non-Derivative options from the Creative Licence suite) that, despite not being compliant with open access, can protect the rights holder from any unwanted use while allowing the data to be shared with more ease than copyrighted material without a CC licence. Eventually, you can also keep the third-party's original full copyright. You will have to highlight any exception to the licence provision of your output ( → 4.4.2.) clearly.

3.4.1. How do copyright collection societies work?

The copyright holder can appoint a collective rights management organisation (CMO) to licence their work and collect fees.

The role of CMOs is:

• to represent right holders,
• to negotiate fees with users,
• to establish tariffs for different uses,
• to grant licences to users,
• to collect licence fees from users,
• to distribute fees to right holders.

CMOs are your point of reference also when common copyright exceptions fail and when dealing with individual copyright owners is impossible or impracticable, that is:

• for orphan works: if the right holders remain unknown or cannot be found following an appropriate research effort, permission can be obtained from CMO if the orphan work is held in public or publicly accessible libraries, educational institutions, museums, collections and archives, or if it was produced, copied, or made available in Switzerland, or handed over to one of the abovementioned institution (art. 22b of the Swiss Copyright Act);
• in case of Extended Collective Licences: the licence allows exclusive rights for a large number of published works and can be applied even if right holders are not represented by the CMO, however the licensed use must not impair the normal exploitation of the works and is limited to Switzerland (art. 43a of the Swiss Copyright Act).

CMOs operate also in other countries, although their legal status and powers may differ.

Useful links:

The collective rights management organisations operating in Switzerland are:

• ProLitteris: for literature, photography and visual art
• SSA (Société Suisse des Auteurs): for dramatic works, musicals and audio-visual works
• SUISA: for musical and non-theatrical works
• SUISSIMAGE: for audiovisual works
• SWISSPERFORM: for related rights.

3.4.2. Reuse user-generated content from social media and online platforms

Social media and online platforms distribute huge amounts of content, including valuable ones: think of Goodreads, Soundcloud, or Vimeo. These resources can be used proactively by you in a participatory project (more on this in the next section) or you can consider reusing what has been published and made available already. Make sure in this case to check both the policy of the medium the content has been published on and, if available, the copyright notice of the specific content. This guide to user-generated content is indicative.

4. PRODUCE open content

4.1. Doing research together

Collaboration is a critical component of scientific research. Working together with peers around the world is becoming easier, thanks to virtual research environments and other platforms and initiatives for collaborative writing, annotation and review, as well as for reference management & discovery. Consult your librarian and browse the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) Marketplace to find tools best suited to your needs, including resources provided by the institution you're affiliated to.

Collaboration can go beyond the scholarly realm, though, and engage society at large: let's take a closer look.

4.1.1. Engaging citizens in scientific research (citizen science)

Citizen science is research made with the engagement of the general public, where citizens voluntarily contribute either with their intellectual effort or knowledge or with their tools and resources. The term "citizens" does not imply lack of competence or knowledge - on the contrary! It is meant to be a neutral term and to distinguish participants from the formal scientific investigators.

The definition of citizen science is quite broad and includes a variety of practices, which - according to the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) - have two characteristics in common: citizens are actively involved in research, in partnership or collaboration with scientists or professionals; and there is a genuine outcome, such as new scientific knowledge, conservation action or policy change.

VISUAL:
13. Models of citizen engagement in science

Citizen science is a pillar of open science: it fosters scientific literacy, it produces data that is considered reliable and it may enrich your research with unforeseen perspectives and knowledge. Citizen science is applied by institutions like NASA, to monitor the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and also in arts, design, and music research. Typically, citizen scientists are engaged in tasks like collecting and classifying data, from the local to the global scale, online as well as offline. For example, they are asked to collect memories in various formats related to a plastic exhibition, to help find out what songs the whole world knows, or to identify constellations in celestial maps from a planetarium's archival collection, including on site through a tailored interactive tool. But their engagement can go beyond this and affect the whole research process, from collectively defining objectives, to creatively identifying solutions (e.g., to develop bottom-up renovation methodology based on the needs and capacities of residents), or to contributing to the peer-review of your paper.

Going beyond the duty of disseminating expertise with the wider audience, citizen science commits to (some levels of) shared authority, which may include interpretative and meaning-making power. It becomes a codesign process, which can start right at the foundation of the research project.

Some questions for you to consider are:

• what levels of authority do you intend to share?
• what's in for the citizen scientists? How are you going to reward their voluntary contribution? Quality of interactions, acknowledgment of contribution, curiosity satisfaction, community building can be part of it
• is it going to be a contribution to your research or co-authorship? What implications does co-authorship have in terms of shared duties and responsibilities? How is co-authorship going to affect the scientific process of validation and publication of outputs?
• what are the associated risks and how are you going to mitigate them? E.g., do you need to set up insurance coverage?
• how are you going to handle intellectual property rights? The advised licence is CC BY-SA
• what kind of dissemination are you planning, beyond the academic realm?  

In all cases, planning ahead, keeping all ethical and legal implications in mind, is paramount. You need to specify your research goals, clarify the scope of the citizens' engagement and set clear community guidelines that outline rights and responsibilities. Also, make sure you communicate properly throughout the project, so that participants are aware of progress at all times: not only is this due, it also fosters motivation.

Useful links:

• Citizen Science Skilling for Library Staff, Researchers, and the Public, guidelines on how to manage a citizen science project by LIBER
• Parthenos training module on citizen science in the (digital) arts and humanities
• PPSR Core is a set of global, transdisciplinary data and metadata standards for use in citizen science projects; it is maintained by the Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences. You can find more resources there

• SciStarter and Zooniverse are platforms dedicated to Citizen Science with millions of volunteers
• Vera is a European citizen science hub dedicated to the humanities. Here's a tutorial. It also helps you find funding  
• EU Citizen.Science is a platform for sharing citizen science projects, resources, tools and training funded by the EU
• Schweiz forscht is the Swiss platform for citizen science projects
• ETH University has a website dedicated to citizen science with links to resources, including the ones it developed: Citizen Science Logger, a tool for crowdsourcing tasks (contributing data in forms of text (survey answers), images, video, audio, geolocation, etc.), and Citizen Science Project Builder, a web-based tool for the analysis of existing digital data (image analysis, pattern recognition, text transcription, mapping, etc.)
• CitSci is a global citizen science support platform. It offers project managers and volunteer citizen scientists a suite of online project management and associated data management, analysis, visualisation, and reporting features. While the focus has so far not been on arts, design, and music, they are open to it and offer services to custom apps and integrations
• Citizen Science: Theory and Practice is an online, open-access, peer-reviewed publication focused on citizen science and other participatory sciences.

4.2. Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence has been around for some time now, but only starting in 2023, and quite abruptly, have AI based services become popular amongst the general public, mainly thanks to generative AI chatbots like Open AI's Chatgpt, Microsoft's Copilot and Google's Gemini, or neural machine translation services like Deepl. The number of applications and their popularity are booming, while legal norming of their usage is lagging behind. A first major regulatory effort was done in 2024 by the EU through its AI ACT, which uses a risk-based approach to set some principles for the development and employment of AI, including transparency obligations.

AI affects academic research as well: it's a powerful resource that can support your work, but it also raises accuracy concerns, copyright infringement risks, as well as ethical issues, because AI reproduces (and might amplify) the biases of the processes and data it was trained with and because of access constraints. Overall, if not used critically, the quality of your research might be affected negatively.

Here are some basic rules you can abide by to safeguard the scientific integrity of your work:

• understanding how AI tools work and learning about their limitations is the first step to capitalise on their potential in a responsible way (a visual metaphor can help);
• keep up to date with national laws and institutional policies: the country where you work, the institution you're affiliated to and resources you are planning to use to disseminate your work are going to regulate AI use, if they haven't yet. Given the fast pace of developments in this field, norms might change over the course of your research project;
• keep up to date with tools, as well as their versions and conditions: new or improved features will show up and might address privacy protection and copyright in a more considerate way;
• protect sensitive data: GDPR and copyright apply also when using large language models (LLM), on which chatbots are based, and AI tools overall. What happens to your data when you feed it into them? Consider that tools might advance quicker than the policies you are required to respect, and that companies' promises might not be fully reliable until certified by independent evaluators;
• mind the bias! AI tools are subject to the so-called "data poisoning" which happens when large quantities of biassed data are ingested into them. The attempt to compensate can be disastrous (see Gemini's image generation controversy in February 2024);
• be creative in their use (e.g., for brainstorming) and don't trust their accuracy: always double-check;
• learn how to effectively use them: depending on how you interact with these tools and train them, the quality of results varies significantly. You can start by providing clear, structured information, including context;
• document the use you make of AI tools, also specifying if any content was AI generated.

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4.3. Use open formats

Open file formats are the ones that ensure accessibility, reuse, derivative works and longevity of your outputs. In case you have to use proprietary formats, keep the raw data but also convert them into open file formats (→ 2.2.4.) and store both versions together. Conversion is advised also for formats that are widely used (like TIFF) but proprietary.

4.4. Prepare data, resources and research outputs for publication

4.4.1. Copyright clearance and personal data

Working digitally, scholars are facing a complex set of legal and ethical issues whenever they want to store, use, publish and share data. Committing to research integrity, which implies fairness, equality, rigour, and accountability in all scholarly activities, can be challenging when it comes to balancing the open research culture with the ethical review procedures and legal requirements for data protection. In practical terms, the doctrine "as open as possible, as restricted as necessary" that guides open science requires you not only to pursue licences that allow for the widest accessibility to your research resources and outputs, but to do so respecting stakeholders' rights: if you're reusing third party data you have to make sure that you're legally authorised to do so and if you are collecting and processing personal data or otherwise confidential information (e.g., protected by intellectual property rights or related to security matters) an explicit authorization is needed as well.

If you're reusing content that has been released under a Creative Commons licence you only have to comply with the licence requirements, no further action is required (that's the beauty of it!). The same goes for works in the public domain, although it is advised to check national laws, as in some countries (like Italy) reproducing and disseminating cultural heritage is subjected to obligations even if they are not protected by copyright any more: you may have to notify authorities and, in case of commercial use, seek authorisation and pay a fee.

Things get more complicated in all other cases, that is, when you are producing new content or reusing materials that are not openly accessible: before you share any research output you have to check that you have permission to do so, respecting intellectual property, privacy and confidentiality. Let's have a look at how to deal with each of them.

a. Copyright clearance

Whenever you produce or reuse content you have to consider all rights holders involved. For example, if you shoot a photograph of a contemporary artwork in a museum, you will need permission from the museum (since you're entering its premises: only private use does not require an authorization) and the artist. Or if you want to reproduce a concert programme the copyright clearance needs to be carried out not only for the programme leaflet as such, but also for all its ingredients: its layout design, fonts, illustrations, and all other elements it is composed of and that might be subjected to intellectual property protection. If the programme leaflet includes a portrait of a musician, the photographer needs to authorise open access reuse and the musician has to permit disclosing and dissemination of personal data (more on this below).

If you have collaborated with a partner institution that shares ownership of the content you produced, it is good practice to have a written agreement specifying the conditions under which you are allowed to release that content. You might consider doing the same with your team members. In both cases such an agreement is not mandatory and technically a verbal agreement can suffice, but writing it down prevents future conflicts.

The agreement should include the kind of CC-licence under which the content is released to you and others.

b. Personal data

Under Swiss and European law, the privacy of any physical person must be protected, as mandated by the Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) respectively. Privacy protection laws distinguish between, on one hand, general personal data, which refers to any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person such as name, address, date of birth, but also technical data like an IP address; and on the other hand, data that needs to be handled with special caution. The Swiss law calls it  "sensitive personal data", that is "data relating to religious, philosophical, political or trade union-related views or activities, data relating to health, the private sphere or affiliation to a race or ethnicity, genetic data, biometric data that uniquely identifies a natural person, data relating to administrative and criminal proceedings or sanctions, data relating to social assistance measures" (Art. 5; sexual orientation is not explicitly mentioned but is included in this definition). Similarly,  GDPR makes a similar distinction but uses a different terminology, and calls this sensitive information "special categories of personal data" (Art. 9). The word "sensitive" might generate some confusion as it is used in different manners depending on the context: it defines a specific category of data under Swiss law, but in many other contexts, including in some of the links listed below, its use is generic and indicates all data that must be protected against unwanted disclosure, either personal or otherwise confidential.  

Anyway, your takeaway is simple: under Swiss and European law, whenever you're dealing with personal information you need consent to collect, process and disclose that information. The authorization has to clarify what information you need and what for, a time frame, and to indicate if any information needs protective provisions like anonymization or pseudonymization:

• Anonymisation is the process of removing personal identifiers that may lead to an individual being identified, even in an indirect way, by aggregating data.
• In pseudonymization personal data is processed in such a way that the data can no longer be attributed to an individual without the use of additional information that is kept separately and non accessible.
• The time frame refers to the period of time during which the personal data can be stored, processed and accessed by you and/or others. Some data will have no limit, some data will.

Let's make an example: if you record an interview on video, you want it to be accessible to all without time limitation, but some personal data (like email, phone number, address) you should keep protected from unwanted disclosure in the active phase of your research, and destroy once your project is closed – it is advised to do so even when not explicitly asked. Different might be the case of institutional contact information (i.e., the institutional email), which your interviewee may want to make public.

At times you will be given the right to process and disclose only pseudonymised information: in these cases you will have to store the relating data that can lead to identifying the individuals involved in a secure way, mention the protective measures that you are applying in the agreement and document them in your Data Management Plan – where you will have to specify conditions to access (e.g., only open upon request to researchers for legitimate reasons), the person who's in charge of the data and her contact. Some citizen scientists, on the contrary, might be very happy to make themselves identifiable. By adjusting the agreements based on the free and informed decision of your data subjects you will make sure that your research is not only open as possible, but also restricted as needed.

If you're working with children (specifically, under the age of 18 in Switzerland and 16 in the EU) or with people who are not capable of discerning (think of a person with dementia), the legal representative will have to sign the authorization for them.

c. Confidential information

Caution is required also when your research involves confidential data other than personal information, e.g., business related data belonging to a company. In this case, too, you need a signed disclosure agreement, which defines terms and conditions of access, processing, and sharing.

Collect the consent forms respectfully, using the opportunity to advocate for open science and scientific literacy. It is your duty to anticipate any possible misuse that disclosing data might generate, also considering that the combined information you share (like a list of events) might potentially lead to identifying a person too. Fortunately, in arts design, and music this is usually not a problem, and apart from the general personal information you should be able to openly share your data.

Preparing your data for publication is a wearying process. It is also an impossible endeavour to accomplish ex-post: make sure you have defined all relevant strategies in the early stages of your research, while setting up your Data Management Plan, and that you systematically get hold of the agreements and authorizations while collecting or producing your data.

The resources below guide you in the identification of data that needs special care and of the changes in the research workflow associated with them. They also support you handling such data with tools and good practices to ensure the strictest ethical, legal conduct while conducting open science.

Useful links:

• Template for you to personalise and adjust as needed for copyright clearance and personal data access and dissemination permission
• The OpenAIRE "How to deal with sensitive data" guide gives an overview of what qualifies as sensitive data and how to prepare sensitive data for storage and sharing
• The "Protect" chapter of the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide covers protocols for ethical review, processing personal data, anonymization and collecting informed consent. The guide had been written with Social Scientists in mind but is useful for anyone working with personal data
• The DARIAH ELDAH Consent Form Wizard supports arts and humanities researchers in obtaining GDPR-compliant, valid consent for data processing in the context of their specific professional activity. This tool will guide you through a questionnaire that will consequently generate a GDPR-compliant form for obtaining consent from data subjects, tailored to your specific purpose and the data categories you intend to collect.

4.4.2. Mark your work with a licence

Once you have checked that you control the copyright of your work's ingredients it's time for you to mark each of them with a Creative Commons licence. Creative Commons's handy Licence Chooser gets you there by asking you just a few questions: it then delivers the licence code, text and icon for your output.

Here's a recap of your options that anticipates the questions you will be asked by the Licence Chooser; open access options are highlighted:

Do you want to release your work in open access?
YES				NO
Do you want to dedicate your work to the public domain?				Do you want to allow commercial use?
YES CC0		NO		YES		NO
		Should adaptations of your work be released under the same or compatible CC licence?		Do you want to allow derivative works?		Do you want to allow derivative works?
		YES CC BY-SA	NO CC BY		NO CC BY-ND	YES CC BY-NC	NO CC BY-NC-ND
						Should adaptations of your work be released under the same or compatible CC licence?
						YES CC BY-NC-SA

Marking your work with a CC licence is easy. The Creative Commons Wiki has a dedicated page that offers instructions and examples for various kinds of media: datasets, images, videos and audio, websites, blogs and content-sharing platforms, presentations as well as offline documents.  

Once you have assigned a licence to a content item, you cannot revoke it for as long as the material is protected by copyright.

a.  Recommended Creative Commons licences by content type

Institutions, funders, and repositories may have their own policies determining what open licence to apply to your research outputs. The following is what we advise:

CC licence	Content type	Rationale
CC0	Metadata Factual and statistical data and databases Digital reproductions of cultural heritage works and collections Internal documents and generic texts Institutional websites without original content	CC0 is the tool for non-copyrighted content. It is supported by OpenGLAM, an initiative and network promoting open access to cultural heritage. It is the free tool of Wikidata.
CC BY	Works signed by you as an author (e.g., articles, texts, photos, videos, audio, recordings of lectures, interviews)	CC BY is the licence supported in Open Science for articles and publications by researchers.
CC BY-SA	Outputs from collaborative projects (including citizen science) with volunteers and partners	CC BY-SA is the most restrictive of the open licences. It requires content to remain free: this is a way of acknowledging the voluntary contribution of participants. It is the licence used by Wikipedia.
CC BY-NC	Services and products developed by students in collaboration with companies Services and products developed in research projects which are to be commercialised.	CC BY-NC is not fully compliant with the requirements of open access. It is a way to balance the right of students and researchers to produce open science with a company's right to exclusive commercial exploitation.

Watch out for the NonDerivative provision, as it prevents reuse such as in translations and further scholarly work that requires reprocessing of your data.  

b. Collections

Collections involve the assembly of separate and independent original works into a collective whole while keeping them organised as distinct separate objects. If you produce a collection reusing CC-licenced works, you must credit each one and indicate its licensing information. Since you are responsible for the selection and arrangement of the various original works in the collection, you are the copyright holder of the collection as such and should apply a licence to it.

Watch out for restrictions: as a general rule DARIAH-EU recommends using the least restrictive licence applicable to your content, if anything in your collection has a Creative Commons licence with a Share-Alike, NonCommercial or NonDerivative provision, then you must also licence the collection under the same CC licence or mark exceptions clearly.

c. What if my work includes third-party material that is not open

If your work includes some closed-access third-party material that you cannot make without, it doesn't mean that you are not allowed to release your work under an open licence: in this case, too, you can exclude the material from your licence provision, therefore respecting the rights of the original copyright holder. Make sure to mark exceptions clearly.

Useful link:

Marking third-party content including exceptions to the licence provision of your work

4.4.3. How to deal with data that cannot be made digitally available for open access

Digitization is a prerequisite for easy knowledge sharing and for open science. But some items can simply not be translated into a digitised medium: they might be too fragile, their size might be unmanageable or their rights holder for some reason prefer not to allow it. In all these cases you will need to find a way to convey the content in a digitised way: the simplest one is a textual description, but be creative as there might be some other solution that serves your scientific needs more effectively.

4.5. Attribution and credits

Research is becoming more and more a collaborative process. The role of each contributor should be clearly stated so that no contribution passes unacknowledged. Use persistent identifiers (like ORCiD) whenever possible.

a. Credit your team

Each member of a research team carries out a specific task. The CRediT taxonomy helps you indicate role and responsibilities.

b. Credit external contributions

Beyond your team, collaboration can happen at many stages and in many forms, from citizen science to open peer-review. Crediting contributions is best agreed with parties, preferably in writing. This way you can avoid mistakes like attributing an authorship contribution to somebody who doesn't want it.

c. Credit your sources

Before you release your research outputs check that all of them are properly credited, so that attribution is visible and traceable. When using a digital resource, add the link and prefer formats that facilitate data linking (e.g., html is better than PDFs). Also, any URL should be accompanied by the date of your last access. To see the Creative Commons licence attribution requirements → 3.2.3.  

Useful link:

The University Library of the Technical University Munich offers various resources, including a citation guide in English and German

5. STORE your data

As a first step, check which kinds of support structures are available at your institution, your librarian is your first point of entry. If your institution has solid data repository facilities and/or data stewards, you are lucky: get them involved from the project planning phase onwards to identify solutions that are best suited for your research as well as compliant with the standards, specifications and protocols of open science. Dedicated staff can also assist you with understanding any specific data management requirements and associated costs. Consulting your colleagues to learn about the habits in your disciplines can also be useful.

But let's take a step back first, as your storage needs while you're actively working on your project and after, once your research outputs are ready to be shared, differ in terms of accessibility requirement, ease of collaboration, and short vs long-term preservation.  

5.1. Storage and backup during the project

During the project's lifetime, while the research process is still active and your outputs are still in the making, it is best to store resources at a shared space with authentication and authorization protocols in place, from where all authorised contributors can access, modify, and version them. In most cases, research performing organisations and their IT support have cloud-based, networked drives that offer ample storage space and data security as well as automatic backup for most purposes. It could be proprietary services like Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, or open source ones such as NextCloud or ShareDocs.

To make an informed decision, consider parameters such as:

• the size of your data (mega- or gigabytes vs. tera-or petabytes)
• the nature of your data (raw and derivative formats)
• number of partners who need simultaneous access
• desired types of access to the data (through landing pages or APIs, or a SPARQL endpoint etc.)
• privacy concerns
• optimal transfer and retrieval time
• the costs of storage
• storage duration.

If you work with personal or confidential data and copyrighted materials, enquire with your institution's research support staff whether your intended storage solution meets your institution's data security policy.

Your data should also be backed up regularly to prevent data loss; your backup should be done in a separate physical location.  

5.1.1. In Switzerland

For the Swiss university community Switch Drive is a secure alternative to commercial cloud storage services. Users can save, share and collaboratively edit files online. It runs entirely on the Switch Cloud, it is connected to the university network and has an Authentication and authorization infrastructure (AAI) that protects access. Switch Drive is available to most university members in Switzerland: if this is your case, you have up to 100 GB of storage and your data is stored securely in Switzerland.

5.2. Storage once research outputs are ready to be shared

While some repositories are great resources for searching data you want to reuse, when it comes to depositing your data you have to rely on scholarly trustworthy ones that ensure long-term preservation and FAIR sharing. Repositories designed for research come with multiple benefits: they usually have their own discovery platforms and are harvested by other scholarly databases, they ensure long-term availability and findability beyond accidentally stumbling across them, and they comply with funders requirements. They are the safest home for your data, enabling future research and verification.

Further benefits are:

• you control who has access to your outputs by using – if needed – the authentication and embargo features of the repository;
• you can add different versions of your outputs and clearly indicate the latest one;
• you can determine how your work has to be cited (which will have to be compliant with the repository citation standards, if there are any);
• and… the necessity of ingesting your resources and outputs in a repository gives you the opportunity to clean up your data!

5.2.1. Research outputs you have to deposit in an open repository

The data that you have to deposit is:

• data that is needed to validate results presented in research publications
• data mentioned in your DMP
• tools needed to validate results

All of the above, as recommended by OpenAire, should be accompanied by its metadata and the information needed to run your tools, if you have any. Make sure that your article or book is deposited in an open repository as well, either by you or your publisher.

5.2.2. Find repositories for your data

Repositories can be disciplinary, institutional, and generic. If your institution has data sharing policies and infrastructures, it is advisable to use your own institutional repository. Otherwise you can use a discipline-specific or a generic one. In these cases verify that your repository of choice meets the required quality standards. A CoreTrustSeal certificate will ensure that your data will remain available in the future in a secure, sustainably maintained and curated environment. Alternative solutions, also recommended by OpenAire, are the repositories that obtain either the Nestor Seal Seal for Trustworthy Digital Archives (verification based on the DIN 31644 standard) or the ISO 16363 certification.

To find trusted research data repositories that best match the technical or legal requirements of your research, visit the Re3data or  the FAIRsharing databases: you can browse by country, disciplines, CoreTrustSeal compliance and many other parameters. OpenDOAR is another useful resource to consult.

Otherwise you can use generic repositories such as Zenodo, which will take almost any dataset, but you can also use discipline-specific ones such as DaSCH or TextGrid, the latter primarily supporting text-based humanities research outputs.

In Switzerland

The Swiss National Data and Service Center for the Humanities  (DaSCH) is a Swiss research data infrastructure primarily funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). It is a FAIR-compliant data repository based on open-source software that ensures the long-term preservation of humanities research data. Among its benefits, the platform provides each object within your database with its own permanent identifier. Your data can be corrected and enriched, and remain editable, visible, directly accessible and searchable within the platform in the long term. DaSCH can store texts, images, audio and video recordings, metadata, annotations, text markup, and other data created in humanities research. It is free of charge for national research projects or those with Swiss participation. For data volumes exceeding 500 GB, annual cost sharing by the project or its hosting institution may be required.

olos

a. Overview of commonly used data repositories

Repository

Ownership

Access

Country

Discipline

Data

Database Licence

Data Licences

Year

PID system

Preservation

Uploads

Software

Compliance

Dryad

Non profit

Open

USA (California Digital Library / Dryad / National Science Foundation)

Generic

Data

CC0

CC0

2018

DOI

Open source

SNSF

European Data Infrastructure (EUDAT)

Non profit

Open

Europe (B2FIND Communities / EUDAT / European Commission)

Generic

Data

DOI

SNSF

Figshare

Commercial

Open

Company Digital Science

Generic

Data

2011

DOI

< 20 GB

SNSF

GitHub

Commercial

Open

Company GitHub, Inc. (acquired by Microsoft in 2018)

Generic

Software

Specific copyrights

2008

No

SNSF

OLOS

Non profit

Open

Switzerland (OLOS Association)

Generic

Data

2011

DOI

SNSF

Open Science Framework (OSF)

Non profit

Open

USA (Center for Open Science)

Generic

Data

DOI

Also partnership with Internet Archive

SNSF

Zenodo

Non profit

Open

CERN / European Commission / OpenAIRE

Generic

Data

2013

DOI

< 50 GB (free)

Free software (Invenio)

SNSF

Swiss Data and Service Center for the Humanities (DaSCH)

Non profit

Open

Switzerland (Data and Service Center for the Humanities / Swiss National Science Foundation / University of Basel)

Humanities

Data

ARK

< 500 GB (free)

SNSF

Harvard Dataverse

Non profit

Open

USA (Harvard University)

Social sciences, Arts and humanities

Data

DOI

< 1TB

SNSF

SWISSUbase (formerly FORSbase)

Non profit

Open

Switzerland (FORS / SWITCH / DaSCH / University of Zürich / University of Lausanne)

Social sciences

Data

DOI

SNSF

Academia.edu

Commercial

Registration

Articles

not open

not open

2008

Not open

Non compliant

ResearchGate

Commercial

Registration

USA - Germany (ResearchGate GmbH)

Articles

not open

not open

2008

No

Non compliant

Google Scholar

Commercial

Articles

Not open

Not open

None

Mendeley

Commercial

Not open

Not open

None

A selection of generic and discipline-specific repositories in line with SNSF's policy is listed on their website.

b. Where to store what

Here's an overview chart on which content type to archive where:

Type of content	Where to store		Licence (if one kind mandatory)
	Kind of storage facility	Example
Recordings	Data repositories
	generic	Zenodo
	subject specific	TextGrid
Music	Data repositories (generic or subject specific)
	Social media	Vimeo, Youtube, Soundcloud
Videos	Data repositories (generic or subject specific, such as TextGrid or Zenodo) and social media (Vimeo, Youtube)
	Social media	Vimeo, Youtube
Texts, articles, data, videos	Institutional website (alternative forms of publications)		Content in CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA, unless differently stated (with attribution and specific copyright or licence)
Articles, monographs, dataset, reports, posters, conference proceedings,	Institutional repositories
Dataset, articles	Research data repositories	Zenodo	Content in CC BY or CC0
Digital cultural heritage collections and their enrichments; structured data	Open repositories for a wide public	Wikidata	CC0
Images, videos, audio, multimedia files	Open repositories for a wide public	Wikimedia Commons	Content in CC0, Public domain, CC BY, CC BY-SA and similar
Websites	Open repositories for a wide public	Internet Archive
Software	Research data repositories
	generic	Zenodo
	subject specific	Software heritage

Useful link:  3D Data Creation to Curation: Community Standards for 3D Data Preservation

b. Storing large volumes of data

Consider parsing larger datasets to smaller units as individual data records to stay within a repository's limit. Zenodo, the default generic data repository, maximises this in 50 GB per dataset.

c. Repositories for research software

Serving as an environment for experiments, visualisations, installations or research analysis, research software can be a valuable research output on its own and, as such, it is also worth sharing alongside other resources. Currently, there are two major repositories in Europe that are committed to software archiving, preservation and citation: Zenodo and Software Heritage.

Relevant GitLab repositories can easily be connected to the project’s Zenodo collection to deposit software releases, together with the provision of appropriate metadata, thus providing contextual information about the software. Zenodo mints DOIs for each released version of the software, and also creates a concept DOI which refers to all versions of a given software. This way, a PID will be assigned to all versions and specific deployments of source codes. This resource guides you through how to set up automated or semi-automated Github-to-Zenodo or GitLab-to-Zenodo exports: https://genr.eu/wp/cite/#Authorise

Software Heritage is a non-profit service for archiving and referencing historical and contemporary software supported by Unesco. It harvests all public GitHub repositories to ensure long-term availability, traceability and citability of research software source codes. You can get started reading the Software Heritage's FAQ.

d. Wikidata

Wikidata is a free, collaboratively edited, multilingual knowledge graph collecting structured data for all Wikimedia projects, but open to other usages, too, and growing fast. The data in Wikidata are published under the CC0 1.0 licence. It allows accumulation, aggregation, digitalization and automation of knowledge. Every entry on Wikidata has a persistent identifier and a label. Hosting structured data created, uploaded and integrated by communities, Wikidata is a notable example of citizen science.

Advantages include:

• impressive visibility and access
• active communities of contributors  
• connected to the world and multilingual
• content available for any reuse
• contributing in filling the knowledge gaps
• infrastructure for images, data, sources, audio, content, documents, maps
• sustainability.

For more information on Wikidata and its use in arts, design and music see:

• Daniel Mietchen, 'Wikidata for Arts and Humanities' Recording not edited
• Camillo Pellizzari, 'Wikidata and research 2024' Recording not edited (Italian)
• Beat Estermann, 'Using Wikidata for Performing Arts Related Data' Recording not edited

e. Repositories for legal copies of your publications

If you are looking for repositories for your pre-print and post-prints publications you can find the most suitable one via the Registry of Open Access Repositories. This brings us to our next chapter!

6. SHARE your research in open access

An immediate, free and permanently available scientific publication is what you aim for: it is a core principle of open science, one that academic institutions and funding bodies require, and a critical objective that you should keep in mind no matter what solution you pursue. To achieve this you will eventually have to deposit your publication in an open repository that ensures long-term preservation. It is advised to do so even if you publish your research in an open access journal or book: it will guarantee free and sustainable access to your work in case the dissemination policy of your publisher changes in the future. But let's proceed one step at a time and start with the publication lifecycle and with how open access can interlace with it.  

6.1. The publishing lifecycle and the open access routes

There are three main steps that make up the lifecycle of a publication. The preprint or author’s version is the first version of your manuscript that you submit for publication to a journal. Most journals allow authors to deposit the author’s version in a repository. Next comes the postprint or author accepted manuscript (AAM): it is the revised version resulting from the peer-reviewing process but without the publisher's final layout. The AAM is what you would deposit via the so-called Green Open Access route. Several journals allow authors to deposit the AAM in a repository. And finally there is the published version or version of record (VoR): it is the article as published in the journal. Depending on the publishing contract you signed, the publisher may have exclusive rights to the distribution of this version of your manuscript.

VISUAL:
14. Typical publishing workflow for an academic journal article (preprint, postprint, and published (diagram by Ginny Barbour, adapted by Thomas Shafeer, Wikimedia Commons, and adapted here again; CC BY 4.0)

There are three open access routes: what changes is which version of the manuscript is disseminated in open access, who pays for it and the timing of the release. The costs relate to the so-called processing charges (often simply referred to as APCs for articles, BPC for books, BCPC for book chapters) a publisher might ask for to release a work in open access.

Let's go through the three open access routes and their characteristics. Also listed are two more options that somehow look like open access but are not:

VISUAL:
15. Table adapted from Open Access Colours, Padua Digital Library, University of Padua, CC0; Open Access logo, Art designer at PLoS, modified by Wikipedia users Nina, Beao, and JakobVoss, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0

Diamond and Gold Open Access are your best options. Green Access is acceptable. Avoid the Hybrid and Bronze models.

6.1.1. Diamond/Platinum Open Access

A free-to-read, free-to-publish model is being actively pursued by CoalitionS, a group of national research funders, European and international organisations and charitable foundations (SNSF included) committed to full and immediate open access. New scholarly publishing venues that are community-driven and academic-led are emerging.

Currently, there are several Swiss universities offering Diamond/Platinum Open Access publishing platforms for journals, such as the Hauptbibliothek Open Publishing Environment (HOPE) of the University of Zürich. The PLATO project, initiated by six Swiss universities and co-funded by the swissuniversities alliance, aims at developing a sustainable funding model that enables collaborative community-driven and high-quality open access publishing in Switzerland.

6.1.2. Gold Open Access

A major lever in promoting open access and changing the business model underlying scholarly journal publishing has been the introduction of the so called transformative agreements (or transitional agreements): these are contracts negotiated between institutions (libraries, national and regional consortia) and publishers based on the principle that money formerly spent on subscriptions should be repurposed to support open access publishing of the negotiating institutions’ authors. If such an agreement is in place, the processing charges for publishing the version of record of your work are taken care of by your institution or funder and the version of record can be openly shared.

Many Swiss universities have made such agreements with big publishers like Taylor and Francis, De Gruyter or Springer Nature.

6.1.3. Green Open Access

You should self-archive a version of your manuscript that matches the version released by the publisher, while other aspects like the layout may be different (author accepted manuscript or postprint): this is in your best interest and it is a requirement for the SNSF and Horizon Europe.  

6.1.4. Embargo period and Creative Commons licences for long-form publications

Compared to articles, open science is not as well established a practice when it comes to long-form publications like monographs or edited collections. Research institutions and funders committed to open science in Switzerland and the EU do not accept embargo periods for journal articles (and in some cases for book chapters neither) any more. For long-form publications like monographs or edited collections, though, provisions vary: Horizon Europe does not tolerate an embargo period, in Switzerland the SNSF accepts up to 12 months if the processing charges are not publicly funded, while for some other European countries 6 or 12 months is admissible.

The recommended licence for long-form publications is CC BY. CC BY-SA is also acceptable. In exceptional cases, where these options are not available to you, e.g., given the amount of effort that is put into a monograph, a NonCommercial Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC) is tolerated (more on recommended licences → 4.3.2.)

A waiver from open access requirements can be requested in case of a book or book chapter facing disproportionately high charges due to image rights. The good news is that open science is becoming the new normal: a clear commitment to science as a global common good will bring about new scholarly community-owned open access publishers and journals to allow Diamond/Platinum open access for both short and long-form publications.

Even if you choose to publish your work in an open access journal or book, deposit the full text of the author accepted manuscript in an open archive: it will guarantee free and sustainable access to your work in case the dissemination policy of your publisher changes in the future.

Useful links:

• The largest, trusted catalogues of open access publication venues are the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which also specifies if article processing charges are to be paid and, if so, how much.
• The Open Edition platform gives an overview of journals and book publishers mainly (but not exclusively) in French speaking areas.
• To learn which journal allows for which version to be shared, including possible embargo periods, you can browse Sherpa Romeo, that aggregates and presents publishers and journals open access policies from around the world
• The  TA Look Up tool lets you check whether your publishing venue has signed a transformative agreement.

VISUAL:
16. Adapted from: Matthias, Lisa; Tennant, Jon (2018); How to make your research open access? For free and legally; figshare; Dataset; CC BY

6.2. Negotiating for open access

A critical advantage of open access publishing is that the ownership of the work stays with the authors. Before submitting your manuscripts check the basics: are you allowed to post your AAM immediately upon publication with a CC licence? Be particularly careful before signing a contract with your publisher, when you have to agree on terms and conditions which usually cover details of ownership, copyright management and licensing of your work. Negotiate where needed. The requirements of your funder and of the institution you are affiliated to are a strong argument in negotiations.

Keep all possible reuse scenarios in mind when evaluating your possible venues:  signing the copyright over to the publisher as a condition for publication could prevent you from reusing your own work for teaching, republishing it elsewhere or otherwise sharing it. In general, be aware of the ownership status of your publications: as their creator, you are their copyright holder by default (in some countries such as Ireland or Austria, some of the usage rights of your work are transferred to your employer while copyright and attribution remain with the author).

Here is an overview of common scenarios:

Situations	Kind of open access	Accessibility	Where can you store it
The publication is available in print and digital formats. All content (including the graphic design) is released under a CC BY licence. This could be achieved by: a free-to-read, free-to-publish model	Diamond Open Access	Open	Uploaded anywhere on all open repositories
	(Green Open Access: possible but not your best option)
a pay-to-publish model	Immediate Gold Open Access
The publication is available in print and digital formats. The publisher uploads the publication on its website (after less than 12 months, in case of a book/chapter) The publication is released under a licence which does not allow commercial use nor derivative works (CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-NC-ND).	Delayed Gold Open Access with embargos	Not open	Institutional website, other websites without commercial use, educational purposes, but no open repositories, no possibility to reprint
The publication is available in print and digital formats. The publisher uploads the publication with all rights reserved on its website (or after less than 12 months, in case of a book/chapter). You need to register to download the publication.	Not really Green Open Access	Not open	Publishers’ website
The publication is available in print and digital formats. Content is released under CC BY; the graphic design is not open. The publisher agrees on Green Open Access, i.e., the possibility of uploading a copy of the paper (preprint) on the institutional repository.	Green Open Access	Open	You can upload your work in your institutional repository. You can upload the content without the typesetting on an open repository like Zenodo
The publisher owns all exclusive rights. You are allowed to upload a version of your work (pre- or postprint) on your institutional repository immediately (or after an embargo period of less than 12  months, in case of a book/chapter).	Delayed Green Open Access	Not open	Institutional repository (< 6 months)
The publisher owns all exclusive rights. You have the possibility of uploading a copy to the institutional repository after an embargo period (more than 12 months in case of a book/chapter).	Not really Green Open Access	Not open	Institutional repository (> 6 months)
The publisher owns all exclusive rights. No possibility for you to upload a copy on the institutional repository.	Not accessible	Not open	Nowhere

Useful links:

• CoalitionS has created a Pre-submission letter template, a Submission cover letter template and a User guide about when, how and why to use these templates
• A model agreement contract with publishers  
• The Journal Checker Tool by CoalitionS lets you find out whether a journal complies with your funder's policy (if is part of the same coalition)

6.2.1. Turn closed access publications into open access retrospectively

You can pursue open access also retrospectively, for publications that you originally released without an open licence, as this possibility is becoming part of the service portfolio of more and more publishers (e.g., Routledge).

Check the conditions of licensing, copyright transfer and the termination of transfer provisions in your publishing contract: had you transferred the copyrights to the publisher, a new agreement between you and the publisher is what you aim for. If you plan to go for the same publisher, you just need to sign a new contract which specifies licensing terms, fees involved, formats, which open licence, and possible compromises. In case of co-authorship the decision has to be a collective one.

If the publication contains third-party materials, before contacting the publisher you need to obtain permission to publish such resources under an open licence.

Acquiring an open licence often comes with a cost. Even if you do not have the resources for it, you can still pursue the Green Open Access (or self-archiving) route and legally deposit your postprint (author accepted manuscript), or the preprint at least, and the underlying data without too much hussle.

Useful links: The Termination of Transfer tool or the SPARC Author Addendum are useful tools that help you to legally share your work and terminate or modify restrictive licensing arrangements you have made with publishers in the past.

6.3. Choose your open access publication venue

6.3.1. The special flavours of the arts, design, and music publishing ecosystem

Arts, design, and music research is embedded in a peculiar ecology when it comes to publishing. Books and journals relevant to your field might be published by small entities, i.e., specialised publishers, non-profit organisations like associations, or local authorities (the cantons in Switzerland). Such publishers often lack the resources and/or the knowledge to pursue open access and might be concerned that it devalues their work, given the effort and extra value they put into their productions, at times not even asking for article/book processing charges. Publications in arts, design and music might have audiences that go beyond the typical scholarly community to include, for example, practitioners. They might be issued in a variety of languages uncommon in other disciplines where English is well established.

All of this, though, doesn't mean that you should surrender open science nor that you should renounce publishing your work through your preferred venue. There are ways for you to negotiate an open access licence that these publishers, once acquainted with academic standards, can welcome. In the worst case scenario, there is always self-archiving. Negotiating could come with some compromises, like depositing in an open access repository a version of your work that has low resolution images or excludes some content. But even such compromises are preferable than giving up entirely on the benefits of open science. Marking your work with a DOI will ensure all versions of your work (the published one and the one you deposited in an open repository) are clearly linked.

6.3.2. Indicators of good quality publishing

The more transparent a journal is regarding their editorial, peer review, and pricing policy, the easier to build trust towards them. In the ideal case, primary emphasis falls on the term "scholarly"; recognising names of your peers in the editorial board or among the authors is usually a promising sign too.

Non negotiables are compliance with your institution's or funder's policies (e.g., relating to hybrid open access or embargo period), assignment of rich metadata and persistent identifiers (such as a DOI) to publications, and indexing by scholarly discovery services such as OpenAIRE Research Graph, Project MUSE and Google Scholar. The two latter aspects are indispensable for discoverability and visibility of your research in the increasingly noisy scholarly communication landscape.

a. Peer review

And then there is peer review: does the publisher request it? And how is it carried out? From the second half of the 20th century on, peer review (open or blind, single or double) gradually has become a gold standard to guarantee quality control of scholarly publication venues. It is a practice that carries an enormous weight in terms of gatekeeping; shaping disciplines, publication patterns and power relations; and governing the (re)distribution of resources such as research grants, promotions, tenure and even larger institutional budgets. Peer review can take place in closed, black boxes: good practice is to make the process transparent, disclosing the identity of the reviewers, publishing their reports, and possibly opening up the process to the wider community.

b. Quality assurances in academic book publishing

In the case of academic books, other practices have taken hold parallel to peer review: an established one is the editorial review, other selection and quality assurance mechanisms might have been defined by the publisher. To increase the complexity, peer review of books in itself exhibits a great diversity: it can happen on the level of the book proposal, on manuscript or chapter level; it can take place internally, among authors of an edited volume, externally, open or closed. The best course of action is to check the publishers’ or series editor's policy to find out if an open access book publisher conducts peer reviews or has other quality assurance processes in place. Some transparency to such policies is brought about by the OPERAS Peer Review Information Service for Monographs (PRISM), which provides information to the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) from a growing number of publishers who already implemented this service.

c. Predatory publishing

Beware of standardised emails that invite you to publish previously unpublished works presented at conferences or blogs, and to publish them in venues with a generic scope: this is often an indicator of predatory publishing. You have all rights to be suspicious also if the collection or the topic of a volume is not specified, or if you can't find information on their editorial and pricing policies.

Useful links:

• The OA Books Toolkit provides an inventory of the most frequently asked questions around topics like selecting a publisher, funding, peer review, licensing, or dissemination and is a well-established tool for researchers who aren’t sure about the legitimacy of a journal. It is curated by OAPEN, the biggest European network which aims at achieving a sustainable publication model and increased visibility for academic books in humanities and social sciences
• "The OA Mythbusters"  series by the Open Access Book Network, a network specialised in open access books
• A guide to Predatory and Questionable Publishing Practices: How to Recognise and Avoid Them

6.3.3. Paper & digital: mind the publisher's attitude

Most publishers produce two editions of the same work: a paper and a digital version. What is included in these two versions depends on the publishers' attitudes towards open access.

• Enriched digital publication: the digital edition is approached as an opportunity to explore alternative forms of publishing and add extra multimedia content not available in the printed version. Due to its complexity, you are encouraged to get in touch with the publisher in advance in order to start planning the enriched digital publication from an early stage of your research project.
• Print and digital are the same
• Impoverished digital publication: the open access digital publication lacks some of the content that is only available in the printed edition. For example, this is the case with digital versions featuring low resolution images or no images at all due to copyright issues.

The three approaches comply with open access (and SNSF's) requirements as long as they provide immediate and free access to the research outputs according to the FAIR principles. The funding body might ask you to justify the discrepancies between the print and the digital version.

xx

6.3.4. Overlay journals

A way to pursue Diamond Open Access is through an overlay journal. These are journals that instead of producing their own content select freely available existing ones. Typically researchers can submit their preprint version as soon as they have deposited it in an open repository; the journal reviews it (usually in a single blind or open peer review) and, if accepted, possibly following modifications as asked, the article is published on the journal's website. This practice allows you to get a DOI in a swift manner; it is not new, but has not been particularly popular in the humanities. New dedicated initiatives are now being launched, amongst them Transformations, a Diamond Open Access overlay journal dedicated to the humanities, built by Dariah and hosted on the Episciences platform: it ensures data and metadata are open, standardised, structured, easily accessible and interoperable, a unique, persistent identifier (DOI), long-term preservation and that authors retain the property of authors.

Further readings:

• Erzsebet Toth-Czifra, 'Born-digital journals built on top of scholarly powerhouses: 10+ 1'

6.3.5. Open data journals

Beside depositing your data in an open repository, open, peer-reviewed data journals offer you an opportunity to describe and document your data and the techniques you applied. Examples of data journals are the Journal of Open Humanities Data and Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

6.3.6. Creating a self-publication in open access

Articles and books can be self-published. You can create and share self-publications on PubPub, which also allows co-creation and collaborative editing. Zenodo can store self-publications too. If you're planning to set up a new journal yourself, e.g. dedicated to an emerging field of research, Open Journal Systems (OJS) offers all you need to manage your research-to-reader workflow; remember to register it on DOAJ.

6.3.7. Institutional publications

Many universities, in Switzerland most of them, have adopted an Open by Default (unless differently stated) policy, which demands that all content produced by the university (including websites, publications, conference proceedings, brochures, magazines, official documents, videos, sound recordings, photographs...) be released in open access.

a. Share your training material

Turning your teaching material into an Open Educational Resource (OER) is a way to contribute to open science and the advancement of the human right to access high-quality education. OER are teaching and learning materials that anyone can freely reuse (and, in co-creation spirit, improve) without having to ask permission. As an OER author you can choose to retain few, if any, ownership rights. There are many OER platforms, look for the ones that suit you best. In the UNESCO's Guidelines on the development of open educational resources policies you can find examples of platforms and good practices, e.g., on quality assurance mechanisms.    

b. Thesis and dissertations

Check your university’s open access policy: in Switzerland, each university has its own regarding PhD theses and dissertations.

If you received funding from either public or private institutions check their policies too.

Your university might ask you to choose from the following access rights:

• immediate open access: your thesis will be published immediately on your institutional repository after the internal review process has been completed
• embargo: your thesis will be published on your institutional repository after the chosen embargo period.

In case your thesis involves a patent, its distribution can be delayed while the patent process is being completed.

Consider depositing your thesis in an open archive as well, if your university’s policy allows it.

6.4. Models of innovative publications accommodating multimedia in open access

Expandable papers, multimodal texts, living documents, enhanced or enriched publications, multimedia productions... what they all have in common is that they are more than just text. More often than not, the output of a research project in the arts, design, and music fields does not come in written form, but it can be video, recording, image, interactive visualisation of spatio-temporal data, 3d models, and much more. This is an asset of these disciplines as well as a challenge, since accommodating this kind of output doesn't come easy.  

Despite ongoing technological progress, the infrastructure that is needed to manage your work according to the open science paradigm is still lacking. This delay is mainly due to the fact that the current infrastructure is based on text-only publications developed over two decades ago, mostly having STEM disciplines in mind. While enhancements are to be foreseen, there is no standard way of fitting multimedia within this infrastructure, you have to experiment and possibly accept compromises. The overall experience of your work (e.g., its layout and interactivity features) is an aspect that might get altered. It is a matter of finding the right balance between your ambitions and available resources: eventually, the decision is yours.  

So, first of all make sure you are clear about your expectations: where and how would you ideally publish your work? Whom would you want to access and reuse it? Will it be a collaborative project? What is the timeframe of your project? It is strongly recommended that you start exploring solutions with the infrastructure people in your university (that is the data steward or the librarian), for example to find out if there is a virtual research environment (VRE) connected to your institutions that meets your needs. VRE provide open source tools and services that support scholars to collaborate, edit, analyse and publish their research. If you are planning on finding ways to an enhanced digital version of your printed publication, get in touch with the publisher at an early stage.

A common solution is to have an impoverished version (e.g., only the text-based content) follow conventional open access routes and link its  multimedia version or individual materials published elsewhere. This can be an enhanced version of your printed publication (e.g., an enriched ebook) or a project website hosted by your institutional infrastructure. Individual multimedia output can be stored on online repositories, as any other data, while streaming platforms and social media are better suited for non-academic communication purposes.

While evaluating these options, don't forget the following parameters:  

• visibility: it is achieved by listing your work in library catalogues and subject portals as well as by making it retrievable by scholarly search engines. For this purposes you need a DOI, a digital object identifier;
• citability: publications must be provided with persistent identifiers and be permanently retrievable. To this end, too, you need a DOI;
• archiving: think long-term. This implies preferring open formats and open solutions to store your data.

Your project website is invisible to scholarly communication services, unless it is hosted on an institutional platform.

A main takeaway is that whatever solution you come up with, it is critical that your multimedia work has a DOI: this will ensure visibility, citability and longevity.

Useful links and examples:

• For a hands-on perspective on the challenges of handling multimedia content in open science, also highlighting common mistakes, have a look at this webinar by Friederike Kramer
• To reflect, check up-to-date resources and seek project-specific advice visit NFDI4Culture, a website curated by a consortium of German institutions dedicated to the humanities, and Dariah Open, DARIAH's blog on scholarly practices in the arts and the humanities

• Examples of innovative long-form scholarship
  • Mid-Republican House From Gabii (University of Michigan Press, 2016)
  • Online Chopin Variorum Edition (Cambridge University Press - Mellon Foundation, 2003-2017)
  • Denis Diderot 'Rameau’s Nephew' – 'Le Neveu de Rameau': A Multi-Media Bilingual Edition (Open Book Publishers, 2016)
  • As I Remember it: Teachings (ʔəms tɑʔɑw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder. (UBC Press, 2014)
  • Walk on the Beach: Things from the Sea, Volume 1 (punctum books, 2016)

• Example of a project developed in a Virtual Research Environment: MARK16: a Virtual Research Environment supported by the SNSF
• Web archiving services
  • Apart from the historic Internet Archive, which offers solutions to institutions and single page archiving to individuals, check national services: the Web Archive Switzerland is a long-term preservation service for websites with strong ties to the country's culture. The initiative, by the Swiss National Library, is selective: you can nominate your project for consideration. Password-protected content and external links are not archived.
• For more publishing innovations from arts and humanities fields, check:
  • Maciej, Maryl, Błaszczyńska, Marta, Szulińska, Agnieszka, Buchner, Anna, Wciślik, Piotr, Zlodi, Iva Melinščak, Stojanovski, Jadranka, Nury, Elisa, Clivaz, Claire, Szleszyński, Bartłomiej, Mojsak, Kajetan, & Franczak, Mateusz. (2021). OPERAS-P Deliverable D6.5: Report on the future of scholarly writing in SSH (Version DRAFT). Zenodo.
  • Adema, Mars, and Steiner (2021), Books Contain Multitudes: Exploring Experimental Publishing. COPIM.

6.5. Communicate!

Beyond your duties to ensure open access to your work there are several ways in which you can share your findings and engage your scientific community as well as the wider audience. This extra effort comes with a benefit to you, as it fosters the recognition that your work deserves and help affirm your profile as a researcher. It is also a way to further honour your commitment to open science. By communicating to the public you contribute to bridging the gap between the scientific world with its technicalities and public awareness and understanding, and support the democratisation of science.

An excellent example of how to make the most of your work is The Lothian Diary Project, a multidisciplinary project dedicated to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Edinburgh and Lothian residents: selected subsets of data originally deposited in the institutional repository have been made public on the Journal of Open Humanities Data; the project has its own website with links to various social media and where findings are properly listed, each provided with a persistent identifier. Findings include papers, a report to the Scottish Parliament, talks and discussions.

6.5.1. Open data journals

This kind of publication offers you an opportunity to describe, document and contextualise your data and the techniques you applied. Established examples in the humanities are the Journal of Open Humanities Data and the Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences, a diamond open access journal that also allows you to exhibit selected datasets like illustrations and other multimedia. A data journal can be video-based too: this is the case with the Journal of Embodied Research.

6.5.2. Websites essentials

da princeton library:

Useful links:

• ArchiveReady is a free online tool which evaluates if a website will be archived correctly by web archives such as the Internet Archive. It does so by checking characteristics like standards compliance and accessibility
• Practical advice on personal academic websites

6.5.3. How to deal with social media

Sharing your work on social media is often suggested in advocacy workshops especially aimed at early career researchers. This practice is highlighted as a means to make a bigger research and societal impact, improve one's outreach and gain more recognition. Following are a few suggestions for you to take into consideration when sharing your work on social media.

a. Check the basics

• Are you the copyright holder of the materials to be shared? If not (because it is owned by your institution or another 3rd party), does the licence allow open sharing?
• Are all the legal, GDPR-related and ethical barriers sorted out? (If confused, go back to section 4.3.)

b. Use the Fediverse: de-centralised and community-controlled platforms over proprietary black boxes

In 2022, the change in ownership and curation policies of Twitter and the associated controversies eloquently showcased how much a critical mass of users, including scholarly communities, are exposed to such proprietary platforms. It also compelled societies at large to look for more transparent, community-controlled, fairer alternatives. The FediGov initiative raises awareness of these issues in an easily accessible manner and offers more sustainable alternatives to the most commonly used social media platforms.

c. Linking instead of copying

The most sustainable way of sharing your work on social media is simply to link its Persistent Identifier or Wikidata ID/link instead of republishing. This allows you to keep versioning clear and even to track its citation and usage metrics.

d. What about academic social media platforms?

The popularity of platforms like Research Gate and Academia.eu seem to be steady over the years, contrary to the fact that the same ownership and transparency issues define their operation as we saw with Twitter. As an addition to the latter, we recommend Scholia, a scholarly discovery service that creates visual scholarly profiles for topics, people, organisations, species, chemicals, etc using bibliographic and other information in Wikidata.

Further reading:

• The blog post 'One more word about ResearchGate/Academia.edu and why using these platforms will never be equal to proper self-archiving' explains it all] and gives you ideas for alternatives.

e. Academic blogs

Solid evidence suggests that blogging about your research does not only make your work (ongoing work in many cases) easily accessible to audiences of different kinds but it also improves your academic writing. Hypotheses platform, managed by OpenEdition offers blogs spaces freely for academics and brings them together in a catalogue broken down to languages and topics. You can apply to open a Hypotheses blog here.

Useful link: How to build your online presence.

6.5.4. Other ways of making your work visible

There are platforms you've got familiar with during the search phase of your research cycle that give you, too, an opportunity to share outputs of your work: particularly, Wikimedia Commons, linked to Wikipedia and Wikidata, and Europeana, the discovery portal for European heritage. Humanities Commons is another interesting platform to consider: it has its own repository, but uploading is only permitted to member organisations and their affiliated.

7. FUND your research

7.1. How to fund open access

Open science implies a change in the business model. A fundamental difference to the traditional closed access (or paywalled) models is that open access costs of publication and dissemination are mostly moved from the demand/reader side to the supply/author side. This, however, does not mean that authors need to pay Article or Book Processing Charges from their pockets. In reality, these costs are covered either by funders of external research grants (such as the Swiss National Science Foundation) or by research performing institutions. So, Horizon Europe funded projects include open access publication costs in their budget, while in Switzerland, universities and other research institutions carry out open science relying on transformative agreements and institutional open access publication funds. This, however, does not always fully cover the needs of each and every affiliated or loosely affiliated scholarly works. To mitigate gaps in the funding landscape, organisations like DARIAH are introducing dedicated open access book publication grants.

In yet another funding model, which is probably the most sustainable one, academic institutions and their libraries pay in a shared pot to collectively fund Open Access publishing venues that are important for their communities and where their authors publish free of charge. This way, these institutions take back ownership of and control over the publishing infrastructure instead of simply paying publication prices defined by for-profit publishers. The Open Library of Humanities is probably the best known example of them. Europe and Switzerland are committed to develop an ecosystem suitable for Diamond Open Access.

For up-to-date information about open access funding options available to you or your research team, contact your institutional library or your national research funder (SNSF, DFG, NWO etc.) for information. Pay attention to what can be funded at what point in your research lifecycle, as some costs can only be covered through the initial grant.

In many cases, scholars without institutional affiliation and project funding, or researchers coming from less resourced countries can apply to the publisher for article and book/chapter processing charges waivers.

Useful link:

• The OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit monitors available funding for open access publication of academic books across Europe
• For information and guidance on Swiss cooperation and funding opportunities within the EU Framework Programme "Horizon Europe" and other initiatives you can consult Euresearch.

7.1.1. Funding of rich media publications

If you want your research to come out as an enriched book or paper, or with a project website, conventional open access funding routes might not be adequate. For example, in Switzerland for the SNSF the costs of a website can be met through the funding grant of your research project, it is therefore at the stage of your application that you have to indicate the website as a necessary resource for your research; its role is also important as websites conceived for dissemination purposes only are not covered by such funding. Enriched e-publications are supported by SNSF's open access funding tools as long as the long-term preservation of the digital objects is financed by additional funding.

Consider that these provisions may change over time as arts, design, and music research is being better integrated in the open science infrastructure.

7.1.2. Open access funding opportunities in Switzerland

An information, funding, open access journal finder for Swiss scholars is available on the SNSF's website, where you can also learn about its pilot project using the ChronosHub platform: here you can apply for processing charges for your publications, including once the project is concluded, provided that the journal is peer-reviewed and its scientific quality acknowledged (you can find out if it is on DOAJ).  Further, in collaboration with the SNSF, swissuniversities offers scientists and scholars practical and financial support for the open access publication of their work.

The Swiss Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries is responsible for negotiating for, providing and administering open access transformative agreements with traditionally closed access publishers across the country. You can read more about them on their website.

7.2. Comply with your funder’s and institution’s open access policies

The main provisions of funders and institutional open access policies are usually related to Creative Commons licences, embargo policy, request for a DOI, and trusted repositories where you can upload your work.

You can make sure that you are compliant with your funder’s and institutional open access mandate by visiting their website and checking their open access policy, or browse the ROARMAP, the Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies.

Open access policies usually outline two main ways to comply with them: either via publishing your works in an open access journal or book series, or via self-archiving - that is, depositing a copy of your work in a trusted repository (for the different routes to open access publishing → 6).

To find out whether your chosen journal is compliant with your funder’s or institution’s mandates and to learn exactly which version of your paper they allow sharing via self-archiving, you can consult SherpaRomeo or the Journal Checker Tool developed by CoalitionS.

7.2.1. Funding statements

In many cases, complying with your funder's requirements also includes adding a funder statement to your publication. This is, basically, a citation of your funding body and even if not formally required it is good practice to have it. The statement usually comprises the grant number too. If your institution or funder has a funder ID, add it as well. This way, it becomes easier to track your work and the impact of your funding not only to humans but also to machines such as bibliometrics services.

The first step is to check whether your funder has a specific template for such a statement. For examples and more details, you can consult this 'How to cite fundinging research' guide.

8. SUSTAINABILITY

This is our closing section but, as you know by now, open science is conceived as a recursive process. What will happen to your work once the research process is completed should be something you had in mind from the very beginning (as captured in your Data Management Plan). At the same time, one research process can generate new ones, by you or other scholars.

In this phase the question is: what should you keep? There is, unfortunately, no standard answer and you have to take into consideration and balance multiple dimensions: the scientific value of your data and its potential for further research, its cultural value, the legal and contractual obligations imposed by the institutions that supported your research, on one hand, and your publisher, on the other hand. For instance, some data, like personal information, you are required to dispose of. Long-term preservation of data and processes also allows others to check the quality of your discoveries. And it needs funding for storage, maintenance, refactoring or migrating ageing codebase. Eventually, storing large amounts of data has an environmental impact too.

8.1. Sustainability scenarios

The following scenarios, adapted from the King’s College Digital Library project sustainability unit, help you think through possible paths to ensure the after-life of your research project.

8.1.1. Scenarios

Scenario 1. Your institution or one of the project partner institutes can guarantee maintenance of your resources in their original format of deployment, including hosting, maintaining functionalities (such as search functionality or hyperlinks) and visual identity (with or without manpower dedicated to sustain the output). In this case, you may set up a service level agreement with the hosting institution to clarify and agree on details of maintenance.

Scenario 2. Your institution, one of the project partner institutes, or a third party organisation can guarantee maintenance of your resources via migration with compromises regarding their original format of deployment. This includes the possibility that your project output becomes part of a bigger collection hosted elsewhere.

Scenario 3. "Boxing" and archiving the different components and layers of the project in trusted repositories and archives: e.g., text-based  data, multimedia, photos and illustrations, software layers in a data repository, associated publications in a preprint repository, interfaces in web archiving services etc. Interlinking the different content types via persistent identifiers (see an example here under "Related identifiers") significantly improves their contextualisation and re-usability. Although this solution comes with a serious loss of functionality and aesthetics of the outputs, especially in the case of complex web artefacts, it still guarantees long-term and stable accessibility, citability, and, if well documented, reusability of the hard-earned resources. In this case, exploring how your institutions or external data infrastructures (national, thematic, or global) can support the export, ingestion and archiving process is key.

8.1.2. Examples to each scenario from around DARIAH

The three scenarios apply to projects big and small. The following are three notable examples:

Scenario 1. The SSH Open Marketplace has been among the flagship outputs of the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud Horizon 2020 project. By the time the project concluded in April 2022, the partners agreed on the commitments taken for the long-term maintenance of the Marketplace. In particular, DARIAH, CLARIN and CESSDA (all part of the European Research Infrastructure Consortium) signed a collaborative and binding agreement to give resources (hosting capacities, technical helpdesk, budgeting for manpower ensuring the population and social life of the service etc.) to maintain and further develop the SSH Open Marketplace after the end of the SSHOC project (If you are curious to learn more about it check the SSHOC Exploitation plan and SSH Open Governance). Following the SSHOC project, the SSH Open Cluster serves as a framework to collaboratively develop thematic branches of the European Open Science Cloud.

Scenario 2. The Standardization Survival Kit has been among the flagship outputs of the PARTHENOS H2020 project. After its conclusion in 2019, DARIAH's Guidelines and Standards Working Group was in charge of maintaining and further populating the service. To complement the voluntary effort of the working group, in 2022, the Standardization Survival Kit has been integrated in the SSH Open Marketplace as one of its key components.

Scenario 3. Within the framework of the same PATHERNOS project, a set of Training Suites have been developed. Once the project concluded, the partners in charge of the development of the training materials exported them from the website and archived them on Zenodo in formats that are easy to reuse and re-adapt to different teaching/learning contexts. The pages of the website have also been submitted to the Internet Archive.

Even if no external grant support is available, it is still possible to significantly strengthen the sustainability of research outputs. This case study describes the linguist Dr. Naomi Truan's strategy (and results!).

8.2. Institutional good practices

Institutions

King’s Digital Lab

King's College is clearly among the most important enablers of digital scholarship in Europe. The volume and richness of the digital outputs and collections produced within the institution - be it research software, exhibitions, visualisations, cultural heritage data enrichment or multilingual publications - made the relevant departments well aware of the pressing sustainability needs and constraints. As a response, the Kings Digital Lab set up a strategy and put resources in place to strategically document and save over 100 digital humanities projects. You can read more about how they select, document, enrich, evaluate and store the different components here.

Centre for Digital Humanities at Princeton

Similarly to the practice of Data Management Planning, the Centre for Digital Humanities at Princeton sets up charters with project teams at an early stage to figure out role and responsibility distributions around keeping project outputs alive. In their approach to building capacity for sustaining DH projects and preserving access to data and software, they view projects as collaborative and process-based scholarship. Therefore, their focus is on implementing project management workflows and documentation tools that can be flexibly applied to projects of different scopes and sizes, and also allow for further refinement in due case. By sharing these resources together with their real-life use cases in digital humanities projects, their aim is to benefit other scholarly communities and sustain a broader conversation about sustainability issues. You can read more about their practices here.

Further reading:

• Jennifer Edmond and Francesca Morselli, Sustainability of Digital Humanities Projects as a Publication and Documentation Challenge, Journal of Documentation, 76, 2, 2020.
• Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2011. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. New York: New York University Press (see also a summary of the book on Wikipedia).

9. Checklists and templates

9.1. Checklists

9.1.1. DMP checklist

Your DMP should include the following information and details:

Data documentation and organisation

• Data source: specify if it's produced by you or reused
• Data formats: identify open standardised file formats, keep the raw version as well

• Folders structure: decide how you organise your folders
• Naming conventions: decide how you name your files
• Metadata: establish metadata standards, determine specific data fields or elements to be used in describing data for specific uses
• Controlled vocabulary: decide on a consistent vocabulary to describe your data

Sensitive data

• Establish ways of dealing with ethical issues and codes of conducts
• Decide how to handle sensitive data
• Mark sensitive data as such

Data storage

• Data size: estimate storage needs
• Storage: decide how and where the data will be stored
• Backup: decide how often and where the data will be backed up
• Risk management: plan how the data will be recovered in the event of an incident

Data preservation

• Decide where you will store your data for long-term access
• Decide how you will prepare your data for long-term preservation
• Decide how you will select the data to be preserved

Responsibilities and resources

• Identify who is responsible for what in relation to data management
• Determine what resources you will require
• Check if additional specialist expertise or equipment is required

Access

• Assign a DOI or PID
• Add the right statement
• Assign a Creative Commons licence
• Specify whether there are any embargoes on the data

Budgeting

• Estimate storage costs for the active phase of your research  
• Estimate sharing costs, if any
• Estimate storage costs for long-term preservation
• Estimate manpower needed to manage your data.  

9.1.2. FAIR checklist

Your dataset complies with the FAIR principles if you can answer YES to the following questions:

• The dataset has a persistent identifier
• It is accompanied by metadata (and further documentation) that is sufficient to understand the data content and context
• The metadata is accessible
• It is clear how to access the data
• The dataset has a user licence which clearly indicates the conditions for reuse of the data
• If reuse restrictions apply, these are clearly marked as exceptions
• The data files are available in open formats (or at least in well supported proprietary format)
• The data belonging to the same project is interlinked.

9.1.3. Collaboration with GLAMs checklist

• I contacted the cultural heritage institution in the initial stages of my research project
• I have identified the data I want to work on
• I have clarified the project's goal
• I have clarified the project’s outputs and agreed on:
  • Publication format
  • Licence
  • Attribution
  • Storage
• We have agreed on distributing responsibilities
• I have added details on mutual agreement between me and GLAMs and data reuse declarations in my DMP.

9.1.4. Produce open content - checklist

• I have checked legal, ethical conditions for sharing and have an agreement with all people and institutions involved;
• I have selected which resources are to be shared, checked sensitive information, applied data protective measures where needed,  indicating if some content cannot be openly shared in the documentation, explaining why and specifying conditions and ways to access it
• I have described my resources in rich metadata and/or README files, including file structure, provenance information, contributors, circumstances of collection, limitations, licence, ‘cite as’ information
• I have documented the software environment in which I’ve carried out the enrichment/analysis process
• I have made my content available in open formats
• I have made all metadata openly available
• I have added the open licence to all content (except where differently noted)
• I have cited all sources and added attributions to all content
• I have a data repository for my research outputs
• I have added how I want my content to be cited/attributed
• I have extracted open content and uploaded it on open repositories
• I have selected an open access publishing venue
• I have interlinked my research outputs.

9.1.5. Select a repository for your research data or other outputs - checklist

When selecting a repository for research data and output, think about the following aspects:

• The repository is owned and sustainably governed by a public body (a research institution, public research infrastructure, CERN etc.?)
• The repository has a robust PID and versioning policy implemented
• The repository has an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) endpoint or other mechanisms enabling discovery services to harvest their content
• The repository has CoreTrustSeal certification
• The repository allows interlinking different outputs belonging to the same project (through related PIDs or through other semantic web technologies)? (This is a plus.)

9.1.6. Publisher checklist

Consider the following when selecting a publisher:

• The publisher's website cleary indicates:
  • Aims and scope of the journal
  • Editorial board, including institutional affiliations of all members
  • Licensing terms
  • Instructions for authors
  • Contact details

• Open access policy*
• Peer review policy or another quality assurance mechanism*
• Copyright terms: information regarding whether the author retains the copyright should be visible on the website*
• Repository policy*
• Author charges (state if the journal doesn’t have any charges or include all fees that may be charged to the author)*

• The publisher's policy is compliant* with my funders and institutional requirements and in particular:
• The publisher grants me the right to reuse a digital copy (possibly the final publication, i.e., the version of record)
• The digital copy can be archived in an open repository and/or in my institutional repository
• I am allowed to retain the authors’ copyrights
• I have agreed with the publisher on the licences of the printed publication and of the digital edition
  • I can archive at least the digital copy under a CC BY licence
• If I have to pay the processing charges, the fee is reasonable
• The publisher does not require an embargo period for the publicationº

• The journal has a valid ISSN, registered and confirmed at the ISSN Portal,

or:  the book publisher has a valid ISBN, registered at the global ISBN portal (updated annually)

*  This might not apply to small entities, i.e., specialised publishers, non-profit organisations, or local authorities: in this case, negotiate with the publisher. Exceptions can be negotiated with your institution and funder as well, but they might be taken into consideration only if you have a strong legitimate reason not to comply with their policies

º  This might not apply for long-form publications: your funder and institutional policy may allow a 6 or 12 months embargo period.

9.1.7. Publishing innovations - checklist

This is a checklist for a peer-reviewed online multimedia publication stored on an institutional website and a repository of choice (compliant with Green Open Access), ideally produced in collaboration with a publisher:

• All content produced by you has an open licence (CC0 for data, CC BY or CC BY-SA for content produced with citizens)
• Content that legitimately needs a different different licence and restrictions is properly marked
• You have signed an agreement that allows you to store your research on a public institutional repository (institutional website)
• Possibility to include multimedia content better than with ebooks (websites allow for videos, links, audio, embedding of other websites…)
• Necessity publish peer-reviewed content to make it significant from an academic perspective
• How to organise peer review for innovative publication models (e.g. as part of institutional websites, peer review of multimedia, data, other digital scholarly objects)
• Possibility to produce it in collaboration with a publisher (for the peer-review, the design and the editorial expertise)
• Access to all multimedia content but compliant with requests of other copyright owners (institutions often allow only the publication of content on the institutional website
• Possibility to aggregate content from different sources (as links or uploads) and to agree with copyright owners for using them on the institutional website only
• Possibility to export a selection of the content (only the open content) and to upload it on open repositories
• Managing the database of the website to separate open content from content under copyright or other licences (to allow the export of open content on open repositories)
• Not a specific website but an institutional website maintained by the institution and with an expected longevity
• You have the possibility to have a backup of the website on the Internet Archive or another public archiving system for long-term preservation.

9.1.8. How to turn your journal in open access - checklist

In order to turn your publication into open access there are some steps you need to take by adding licensing details and other information on your website, your journal and each article. The following checklist is loosely based on the requirements of DOAJ

Website: the journal website must include

• OA policy
• Licensing terms
• Copyright terms: information regarding whether the author retains the copyright should be visible on the website
• Journal ISSN
• Peer review policy
• Editorial board (including institutional affiliations of all members)
• Aims and scope of the journal
• Instructions for authors
• Repository policy
• Author charges (state if the journal doesn’t have any charges or include all fees that may be charged to the author)
• Contact details

Journal: the journal must have

• a valid ISSN, fully registered and confirmed at the ISSN Portal: https://portal.issn.org/

Article: each article should have a display information regarding

• DOI
• Licensing terms
• How to cite
• Author’s ORCID in the metadata

About & credits

... Valerio Bozzolan, Giovanni Pensa