Licensing

Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of their own work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.

A presentation about the three layers of CC licenses,  is licensed under CC BY, meaning that  users must attribute the content creator when using work licensed under this. 

In the context of Open Science you can mark your research results as public domain or use Creative Commons CC0 license to dedicate content to the public domain.

Research data (facts, names, numbers) is not protected as amatter of law, as it is collected, not created. However, a structured and organized database is under protection of law, as investments and intellectual effort have made to create and manage it.

For example, DRYAD repository publishes the datasets under CC0 license. 

Fact sheet on Creative Commons and Open Science: