UtrechtUniversity
[FEATURE] Make license.txt available for restricted access publication.
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
When a Yoda publication is a restricted access publication, the data is not accessible and only the metadata is shown. The license.txt is part of the data, but as it is a restricted package, it is not viewable (because you can't get to the data where the license.txt resides).
Describe the solution you'd like
Make the license.txtx accessible in either the metadata landing page or separate access to license and data package.
Describe alternatives you've considered
Individuals interested in the license of a restricted package could contact the researcher or support department, but that requires more communication. Another part could be to publish a license openly separately and provide the link to this publication in the restricted access publication metadata (under related resources).
Additional context
Feature request from @DorienHuijser and @NehaMoopen
At the VU we created a Template for a custom license text in which the researcher can detail what the data can be used for. It would indeed be great if a visitor could view the contents before deciding if it makes sense to request the dataset.
Another option could be to add a "Rights" text field when a user chooses "Custom" as license. Datacite allows free text in there (https://datacite-metadata-schema.readthedocs.io/en/4.5/properties/rights/)? Then the contents could be shown in the metadata on the landing page.
We've had some more discussion about this and we realized it will be an extra burden for the datamanagers to check what is in the license.txt since that could get quite specific and maybe even contain sensitive information.
The biggest problem is that the landing page now just says "custom" and visitors have no idea why or how. Most of that could be covered by a general text on why datasets can be Closed or Restricted and how the actual request procedure works for Restricted datasets.
Of course this text will be specific to each institution, so it's best to host it on one of our own sites.
We would like to propose adding a link to landing pages of closed and restricted datasets that we can set ourselves (on the admin page).
@DorienHuijser and @nehamoopen, what do you think of this idea?
@peer35 Do you mean that this would be an informative page on how to deal with restricted and closed access datasets? If so, I still think that there should be information alongside the dataset about if, when and how to access the dataset when it is restricted, as the exact terms, conditions and procedure probably differ per dataset (at least at UU this is the case). At the moment we just advise researchers to put a contact email in the Description as there is no other way to otherwise find out how to access the data... (we now get questions centrally about restricted datasets that we do not know anything about)
I was thinking more recently it would also be nice to do it in the same way as Dataverse with different fields for different aspects of a "custom license" (example, see "Terms" tab). But that doesn't solve the issue you raised about the burden on data managers of course..
