The work of Fondazione SoutHeritage (FSH) often result in tangible products, such as reports, papers, research, data sets, books or video, that are covered by various intellectual property regimes, such as copyright and patent (“Work Product”). In addition, FSH itself creates and commissions a substantial amount of Work Product. FSH believes that its mission is advanced when the work product we support and create is made broadly available to the public.

FSH’s policy is to ensure that both its own work product and that of its contributors furthers its mission purposes and that it benefits the public. To that end, FSH has granted a Creative Commons License (CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0) to virtually all of its own work product. Under the terms of this license, anyone may copy and widely distribute FSH’s work product without charge for non-commercial purposes, provided that they do not alter it, that they credit the Fondazione SoutHeritage as the creator, and that they provide a link to FSH’s website. Our images are not governed by the Creative Commons license and may not be used without our written permission.

We believe that FSH’s mission is served when our contributrs’ work product is also made widely available to the public, with appropriate protection of legitimate interests. To that end, when a collaboration produce Work Product, FSH often includes a clause in its agreements, whereby agree the contributor to consider broadly licensing all work product created with FSH support using a Creative Commons license and to inform FSH of their decision.

FSH recognizes there may be circumstances where limited or delayed dissemination of contributor work product or limited access to data may be appropriate to protect legitimate interests of the contributor, other funders, or principal investigators or participants in research studies. Where FSH invites contributors to consider using a Creative Commons license for their work product, the agreement provides grantees with the flexibility to choose not to grant any such license.

Though FSH believes that, in most cases, intellectual property rights should not limit or deny access to contributor’ work product, contributors remain free to determine their own policies on such matters