In brief
Specialist data — clinical guidelines, engineering records, legal analyses, annotated research corpora — can be valuable for fine-tuning and evaluation. There are two routes: license an existing body of work you own, or contribute expertise to a lab that pays for newly created data. This site focuses on the first.
Licensing data vs. contributing expertise
| Licensing an existing dataset | Contributing as an expert | |
|---|---|---|
| What you provide | A body of data you own | Your time and judgment, creating new data |
| Who you deal with | Licensors, brokers, model developers | Expert networks and annotation vendors |
| Key question | Do you hold licensable rights? | Do you meet the network's qualification bar? |
A provider may commission expert work and separately license existing datasets. Ask which relationship is proposed and whether you keep rights in any new work. See provider categories for the questions to ask.
Examples of licensable expert data
- Proprietary question banks and graded assessments you authored
- Annotated research corpora where the institution holds rights
- Technical documentation and troubleshooting records owned by the company
- Curated case analyses with all client data removed
Note
Professional confidentiality obligations (patient, client, employer) usually override any wish to license. If in doubt, the data is not licensable.