So you want to share scientific data, but what license to use? The Panton Principles have something to say:

“Many widely recognized licenses are not intended for, and are not appropriate for, data or collections of data. A variety of waivers and licenses that are designed for and appropriate for the treatment of data are described here. Creative Commons licenses (apart from CCZero), GFDL, GPL, BSD, etc are NOT appropriate for data and their use is STRONGLY discouraged.”

Instead, the Panton Principles recommends the four licenses conforming to the 11 requirements of the Open Knowledge Definition: the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL), the Open Data Commons Attribution License, the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL), and Creative Commons’ CC Zero license.