The legal infrastructure of the Data Center provides a framework enabling the University of Pittsburgh to operate a shared open data repository in collaboration with Allegheny County and the City of Pittsburgh. Additional data users in Western Pennsylvania are also able to use the Data Center’s infrastructure to publish open data.
Data Deposit Agreement: The first part of this legal infrastructure consists of a data deposit agreement between publishers and the University of Pittsburgh. This agreement enables these organizations to share data on the Data Center’s open data repository. Please let us know if you’re interested in sharing data with us.
Terms of Use: The second piece of the infrastructure governs the terms of use for the Data Center’s open data repository. Data users are prompted to agree to these terms (via a click-through license) prior to using the open data repository.
Data License: The third piece of the infrastructure involves the data license. Data licenses are important in that they allow data users to clearly understand conditions under which data can be re-used. The Data Center asks each data provider to either assign a license to each database they share, or explicitly assign the database to the public domain. Data providers are also asked to provide a default license to be assigned by the Data Center if no license is specified at the time of publication. If you’re interested in learning more about the individual licenses you’re most-likely to encounter on the Data Center’s open data portal, please refer to our data license resources. Some licenses require data users to provide attribution. Please see our guide to attribution and citation if you’d like to learn more about how to provide proper credit if using data from the Data Center’s open data repository.