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Well, there's the GPL-styled approach: anyone with access to the results must also have access to the associated data. This doesn't mean it is mandatory to make it public, though you'd have to restrict the redistribution freedom.

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I recently used a large dataset of tweets in a research project. As far as I know, I do not have the rights to distribute these.

I also used a dataset consisting of newspaper articles. It cost me $1.000 to get access to, and I definitely do not have the rights to redistribute it.

As long as you provide a detailed enough description of the source of your dataset that I can reproduce it myself then that is fine. So in your first case tell me what criteria you used to select your tweets and in the second tell me where to send my $1000 and what to ask for.

Unfortunately not everyone reports this information. Here is a study that we did of over 500 papers using online social network data: http://tnhh.org/research/pubs/tetc2015.pdf While most authors would report high-level characteristics (e.g., which social network they measured), fewer authors reported how they sampled the network or collected data, and very few people reported on how they handled ethics, privacy and so forth.

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