An important part of any plan for data distribution is deciding the expectations you have for how your users will cite, share, or remix your data. The list of expectations for how you want users to work with your data is called the data's Terms of Use (ToU). The ToU may also give the users specific rights, such as the ability to make changes or redistribute the data. This collection of rights that you grant to the users is called the data license. Users can choose to use your dataset—or not—based on whether they agree to abide by its ToU. They can also decide to use the data based on whether what they want to do with the data has been allowed by its license.

In this section, we will outline a few choices you can make for how to set expectations for how users should interact with your data. We will also review some of the most common items you may wish to include in the ToU, as well as some of the more common pre-made licenses that can be applied to...