Although we make no claim to comprehensiveness, our analysis of possible legal restrictions has shown that there are provisions in export control law, information security law, health law, genetic engineering law, environmental law, chemicals law, food law, energy and nuclear energy law, and financial market law that may prevent research data from being made accessible as ORD. In addition to legal restrictions, account must also be taken of possible third-party rights. Of particular relevance here are copyright claims, e.g. for copyright-protected elements of a data record or for certain databases, as well as claims arising from the protection of manufacturing and trade secrets (Art. 162 Criminal Code [SCC] and Art. 6 Unfair Competition Act [UCA]), from the Unfair Competition Act generally (Art. 5 (c) UCA) and from provisions of data protection law.

In addition, contracts with other universities or companies may contain provisions on the handling of data, in particular confidentiality obligations, which must be complied with in connection with ORD.

Implementation of an ORD strategy must be undertaken within the framework of Swiss constitutional law. A legal obligation to make data publicly accessible can affect and possibly violate academic freedom, freedom of property and freedom to engage in commerce. In addition, competition law rules may be relevant, in particular with regard to the duty to make data available and with regard to possible pricing.

ORD providers are generally legally free to draft licence agreements that allow third parties to use the data. In individual agreements, they can impose obligations on licensees, e.g. to pay a royalty. However, it will generally make sense to use standard licences, in particular the Creative Commons Zero License (CC0) or the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).