Reuse agreement template between Cultural Heritage Institutions and researchers

A defining feature of data and data workflows in the arts and humanities domain is their dependence on cultural heritage sources hosted and curated in museums, libraries, galleries and archives. A major difficulty when scholars interact with heritage data is that the nature of the cooperation between researchers and Cultural Heritage Institutions and the researchers working in CHIs (henceforth CHIs) is often constrained by structural and legal challenges but even more by uncertainties as to the expectations of both parties.This recognition led several European organizations such as APEF, CLARIN, Europeana, E-RIHS to come together and join forces under the governance of DARIAH to set up principles and mechanisms for improving the conditions for the use and re-use of cultural heritage data issued by cultural heritage institutions and studied and enriched by researchers. As a first step of this joint effort is the Heritage Data Reuse Charter (https://datacharter.hypotheses.org/) establishes 6 basic principles for improving the use and re-use of cultural heritage resources by researchers and , to help all the relevant actors to work together to connect and improve access to heritage data. These are: Reciprocity, Interoperability, Citability, Openness, Stewardship and Trustworthiness.As a further step in translating these principles to actual data workflows the survey below serves as a template to frame exchanges around cultural heritage data by enabling both Cultural Heritage Institutions, infrastructure providers and researchers and to clarify their goals at the beginning and the project, to specify access to data, provenance information, preferred citation standards, hosting responsibilities etc. on the basis of which the parties can arrive at mutual reuse agreements that could serve as a starting point for a FAIR-by-construction data management, right from the project planning/application phase. In practice, the survey below can be flexibly applied in platform-independent ways in exchange protocols between Cultural Heritage Institutions and researchers, Institutions who sign the Charter could use it (and expect to use such surveys) in their own exchange protocols. Another direction of future developments is to set up a platform dedicated to such exchanges. On the other hand, researchers are encouraged to contact the CHIs during the initial stages of their project in order to explain their plans and figure details of transaction together. This mutual declaration can later be a powerful component in their Data Management Plans as it shows evidence for responsible and fair conduct of cultural heritage data, and fair (but also FAIR) research data management practices that are based on partnership with the holding institution. As enclosing a Research Data Management Plan to grant applications is becoming a more and more common requirement among research funders, we need to raise the funders’ awareness to the fact that such bi- or trilateral agreements and data reuse declarations among researchers, CHIs and infrastructure providers are crucial domain-specific components of FAIR data management.