An eScience Tool for Understanding Copyright in Data Driven Sciences

Understanding the impacts of copyright is a challenge for the sharing and reuse of our research data. There is growing recognition of the problem, but the legal knowledge required to navigate through the minefield of restrictions and risks is often too difficult to uncover and understand. As of yet there are no appropriate tools to aid researchers, librarians and research policy makers. To address this gap we present Camden, an automated copyright reasoning tool designed to integrate into existing research workflows. At its core, Camden uses dynamically generated defeasible rules to reason over the legality of a situation of using, combining and publishing data, while additionally suggesting potential licenses by which to safely share derived research outputs. This functionality has been wrapped up into an embedded software library and offered as a web application. In this paper we introduce Camden, describe its model of computational reasoning and discuss how it can be included into existing and future eResearch tools and services.