Manage data rights

Overview overview link

Governments must actively manage data rights when working with vendors and contractors. If not, unscrupulous vendors or contractors may hold your data hostage.

Problem problem link

Vendors and contractors may claim ownership or other rights to public data.
Depending on the contract terms, this can create problems. For example, some jurisdictions have lost access to their public data. Some vendors may attempt to retain your data even after the contract is complete. In the worst cases, data ownership problems may lead to a vendor claiming that the jurisdiction cannot use their data in another tool.

Solution solution link

Ensure that contracts include terms that manage rights for data that you create, collect, and/or manage when providing a public service or function. Work with your legal and procurement team to review and update data terms. Include these terms in any agreement that involves the use of public data. This may include contracts with software vendors, service providers, and even consultants.

Context context link

Most vendors and consultants have fair and standard data terms. Yet each bullet below describes a real data problem from a jurisdiction.

• A vendor or consultant claims that they own your data. They don’t allow you to use the data with another tool or vendor, e.g., constituent email addresses.
• A consultant claims that they only need to provide you with the summary reports of an analysis. They claim that they own the underlying datasets that they collected on your behalf.
• A vendor claims that they cannot extract your data from their software. Or they will only give you the data in a proprietary tool that they control.
• A vendor claims that the database design (e.g., table relationships) is their intellectual property, so they cannot give you the documentation. Without the database design, you are unable to analyze the underlying data.

You must manage your data rights to avoid these types of problems.

Protect ownership and access to your data protect ownership and access to your data link

Many data terms exist for privacy, security, and data management. Data ownership and data access are the two most important data rights to manage.

Data ownership data ownership link

Data ownership terms ensure that:

• Your jurisdiction owns your data
• Your data is only used for authorized purposes

Do not grant public data ownership or intellectual property rights to vendors or consultants. Instead, retain ownership of public data when vendors collect, store, manage, or otherwise use data on behalf of your jurisdiction, as well as derivative works made from public data.

Do grant vendors and contractors the right to use public data to perform services per any contract or agreement. But you should forbid them from using the data for their own purposes or later use.

Data access data access link

Data access terms ensure ready access to public data. This includes the ability to extract data from vendor systems for analysis, migration to other tools, and more.

You must be able to access and extract data from vendor systems. You should be able to access the data in machine-readable and non-proprietary formats, such as .csv. This lets your team use the data in common tools like Excel.

For data in a relational database, you should have access to the database design. This will help you and other service providers use the data for reporting, analysis, and systems integration.

You should also have access via an application programming interface, or API. An API is a language that allows software and computers to talk to each other. Vendor APIs should be well-documented and maintained. This will support future interoperability with other systems.

Create standard legal terms create standard legal terms link

The learn more section provides links to resources with sample legal terms. Share this with your lawyers.

Mantras mantras link

• Public data is our data
• Ownership means access

Checklist checklist link

• Identify your jurisdictions’ standard contract terms.
• Compare your jurisdictions’ terms to the ones we recommend and identify any gaps.
• Meet with your legal team to review any gaps.
• Work with your legal and procurement teams to write new contract terms to close gaps.
• Ensure the terms apply to all agreements that involve public data, including renewals.
• If a vendor has similar terms, don’t spend time and expense negotiating over exact wording.

Questions to ask questions to ask link

• What are our jurisdictions’ contract terms?
• Do those terms address ownership and access to data?
• Who is in charge of editing our contract terms?
• Who is in charge of including terms in contracts negotiations?
• Which contracts do we need to amend to include new terms?

Learn more learn more link

• Data Ownership and Usage Terms for Government Contracts, GovEx Labs at Center for Government Excellence93