TK labels & CC licenses

[Mara van der Ploeg]

Hi all, 

At DataverseNO, we are currently working on developing guides and improved guidelines for handling sensitive data. Indigenous data is of course an important part of this. We’re super excited about the implementation of TK labels, but I have some questions regarding how they interact with Creative Commons (CC) licenses. Specifically:

1. If data is published with certain TK Labels that impose specific restrictions, how does this affect the choice of a CC license?
2. Should information about the TK Labels also be included in the "Terms" tab of a dataset?
3. Are there any best practices or resources available that explain how to align TK Labels with CC licenses?

I have tried to find information on this topic but have not been successful so far. I would greatly appreciate any insights, experiences, or resources the community could share on this matter.

Have a great day,
Mara

[James Myers]

Mara,

The only ‘official’ answer I’m aware of comes from the Local Contexts FAQ:

 

How do the Labels and Notices fit in with existing copyright, Creative Commons licenses, and RightsStatements.org?

The Labels and Notices are extra-legal mechanisms, meaning that they work outside existing legislation. They have been developed to complement Creative Commons licenses, and Creative Commons and Local Contexts are offering joint training in this area in the future. To use Creative Commons, you need to already be a copyright holder. To use the Labels you do not need to be a copyright holder.

Local Contexts operates at a more specific level than RightsStatements.org. Specially, the Notices and Labels recognize Indigenous rights that might otherwise not be recognized as “rights” as defined by RightsStatements.org. Again, Local Contexts works beyond standard copyright interests.

 

There is a Dataverse/Local Contexts policy group starting to discuss some of these issues that you might want to join (led by Sonia Barbosa). There will be a presentation/discussion at the 2026 Dataverse Community Meeting too.

 

W.r.t. the current integration mechanism used to associate Local Contexts projects, and their Notices and Labels, with Dataverse Datasets, we had multiple discussions between Local Contexts and Dataverse installations and eventually chose the current implementation using a custom metadata block and the external vocabulary mechanism as a way to get relatively rich functionality, e.g. displaying the Notices and Labels with icons next to license information in the summary section of the dataset pages, while avoiding the costs and complexities of deeper integration. Putting the Local Contexts information on the Terms tab, and even allowing one to add Notices and Labels from Dataverse (as opposed to linking to a Local Contexts project and having Notices and Labels added there) could be done at some point, but we’d need to resolve many issues – the question about how licenses and Local Contexts statements interact that you raise, how we would handle the fact that the people contributing the data and specifying the license (those who can edit the dataset) may not be those who can add Notices or those with the authority to create and assign Labels (new permissions in Dataverse, possibly single-sign-on with Local Contexts, etc.), what functionality for managing Notices and Labels would be in Dataverse and when and how would you redirect to Local Contexts web site, how would information between the sites be kept in sync, etc.

 

FWIW: Beyond the functionality that is in Dataverse 6.10, The Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) has just submitted a PR that will add information about the Notices and Labels to the metadata submitted to DataCite with a DOI (and to the JSON, OAI_ORE, and DataCite metadata exports), leveraging the Local Contexts/DataCite recommendations (see the PR for a link).

 

Hope that helps,

 

-- Jim

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