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Publisher Guidance

Step 2. Choose an open license

Grants data published using the 360Giving Data Standard is open data. ‘Open’ means that anyone can freely access, use, change and share the data for any purpose.

Publishing your 360Giving data under an open license is a simple way to let people know that they have permission to use the data, and share any conditions about how they can use it.

Licenses are free to use – there is no charge for openly licensing your 360Giving data.

Decide which open license to use

The license we recommend for most publishers is the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). 

With this license, anyone can share or adapt your data for any purpose, even commercially. They must acknowledge you as the publisher of the dataset, include a link to the license, and mention any changes they have made. 

Open license for the public sector

If you are a UK public sector organisation, you should use the Open Government License. This is the UK government’s open data license, which all public sector bodies are encouraged to use by the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015 (RPSI).

Further resources

Example open license statement

Here’s an example of a license statement using the CC BY 4.0 license. Just replace the words in square brackets with information about your organisation and grants.

“[Organisation] is committed to transparency, and we work with 360Giving to publish information about our grants using the 360Giving Data Standard. Our awarded grants since [Year] are available as [File Type] here. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You can view the licence terms on the Creative Commons site. This means the data is freely accessible to anyone to be used and shared as they wish. The data must be attributed to [Organisation].

We believe that with better information, funders can be more informed, effective and strategic decision-makers. 360Giving supports funders to publish open data about their grants, makes the data available in a range of free online tools and supports people to use this data to improve charitable giving through a more informed understanding of the grantmaking picture.”

How to use an open license for your 360Giving data

Using an open license simply means including the details of the license alongside your 360Giving data file. 

For example, if you add a public page to your website where your data file will be hosted, you can add a license statement like the one above to the same page. 

Another way is to include a link to the license within your data file itself, in the ‘License’ section of the Metadata tab of your spreadsheet. For the CC BY 4.0 license you would link to this page.

If you are publishing your data in JSON file format, metadata is included in the Package Schema. 

Further resources

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