Data licenses are documents that define how data can be shared with others. Data licenses allow the copyright holder of the data to restrict or open access to the intellectual property.  

If you are purchasing data, the data provider will provide you with a data license that will define how you can use the data, what you can do with derivatives of the data, who you can share the data with, and how long you can keep the data.  

We recommend the Creative Commons License for sharing data openly. The Creative Commons website explains the differences between the different versions of the license and is translated into many different languages. Description of the different Creative Commons Licenses. The most popular licenses in the sciences are CC-BY and CC-BY-SA. The Netherlands government publishes datasets generally under the CC-0 license.  

For databases the Open Commons offers the Open Commons Database License (ODbL), which is managed by the Open Data Commons. OpenStreetMap makes use of the Open Database License, which defines the conditions of reuse of the database itself and not the content, and the data that is submitted to OpenStreetMap is owned by the contributors. Open commons also offers the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-BY), which is similar to the CC-BY license.  

Use this tool to help find a proper data license:

https://ufal.github.io/public-license-selector/ 

Or contact your data steward!