By Neil Chue Hong.

Choosing an open-source licence for the code you've developed as part of your research project is difficult. Not because there's a lack of information, but because there's too much! Enter "how to choose an open source licence" into your favourite search engine, and you'll find hundreds of guides, blog posts and even rants.

Most of the guides are written with a software developer in mind, particularly someone who is creating a standalone tool or application. There are few guides that take the perspective of a researcher who's developed a useful piece of code. Getting this code reused can be a win-win for the researcher, increasing the visibility of their work and enabling new scientific collaborations. Choosing a licence is a vital step before this can happen.

Here at the Institute, we've been reading through the material on licences and have written a guide to choosing the right guides - a meta-guide to help you choose an open-source licence! Our guide highlights out some key webpages and documents that we think are useful to researchers.

We want to find out more about the information you need to choose a licence. For example, are you:

• Concerned about people contributing back modifications?
• Worried about people giving you credit for your work?
• Panicky about patents?
• Clueless about what steps you need to take? 
• Troubled about how to sell licensing to your supervisor?

We'd like to hear from you about what you'd like us to put into a second edition of the guide - please leave your comments below, or email us.