A B S T R A C T This review article gives a brief overview of some of the key legal challenges the OpenScienceLink, http://opensciencelink.eu (hereafter OSL) project faced with publishing biomedical research data online on an open access and re-use basis. Firstly, we give an overview of some of the key privacy challenges that the OSL project faced. Secondly, we analyse the intellectual property challenges that research data possesses and how this type of data could be protected, considering that purely factual elements are generally not protected under intellectual property laws. In this respect, this article also looks at a number of licensing options for these specific types of data.