In a recent blog post Peter Murray-Rust asks whether licenses are needed for open data? The post, and a couple of posts that inspired his post.
My quick opinions. Data needs to be licensed in some form, even if it’s open. There is a reason I like Creative Commons licensing. The ability to upload pictures and text, and decide what form of licensing I could put on it, how it should be acknowledged, etc etc. The question I have always had in my mind is how CC licensing translates to scientific data. When it comes to papers and textual data, Creative Commons works, e.g. PLoS One, but what about data, e.g. protein structural information, or the intensities from a microarray experiment. Do they lend themselves up to traditional creative commons licensing? This is where I am curious what the Science Commons project is planning. Is there a way for scientists to put their data out for public consumption, including perhaps their protocols and procedures, but license them in such a way that they are properly acknowledged and the door to commercialization is kept open? The materials transfer project and neurocommons project hint at the possibilities, but even they don’t quite encapsulate the problem. These are early days, since there are a lot of scientists who are not even thinking about this problem, or have concerns about IP or other issues. The next few years are going to be very interesting.
Further reading
Open education license draft
Assymetry, Hypcrisy, and Public Domain
Technorati Tags: Cleative Commons, Science Commons, Open Data
4 Comments
don’t you worry … we here at science commons are in the midst of exploring this very problem
as you can imagine, it’s a much more complex issue than it may seem, hence why we are currently working to gather the right parties around the table (a number of different tables, as well) to explore this. our hope is to have a better insight on this over the next few months / sometime in the fall. stay tuned, and great post, deepak!
don't you worry … we here at science commons are in the midst of exploring this very problem
as you can imagine, it's a much more complex issue than it may seem, hence why we are currently working to gather the right parties around the table (a number of different tables, as well) to explore this. our hope is to have a better insight on this over the next few months / sometime in the fall. stay tuned, and great post, deepak!
It is very complex, which is precisely why CC licensing as is won’t work. I was pretty sure you guys were looking at the problem. Hopefully there won’t be too many tables and you can start combining them at some point.
Will be watching and waiting
It is very complex, which is precisely why CC licensing as is won't work. I was pretty sure you guys were looking at the problem. Hopefully there won't be too many tables and you can start combining them at some point.
Will be watching and waiting
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[...] For more discussion on data licenses, there is a good discussion happening elsewhere via Deepak Singh, David Wiley, and Peter Murray-Rust. August 13, 2007 | Filed Under Open Access, Privacy, Genomic Data, Uncategorized [...]
[...] The way I look at it, Google is saying this – we have the hardware; it doesn’t cost us much, so send it across to us and we will hold it, but not just for you. To me and others that sounds rather cool and the way things should be. To others it is troublesome, and I believe that is because of the subject of data ownership. While one might not agree with the protectionist approaches of scientists when it comes to their data, their apprehension is somewhat understood. This issue will not get resolved till there is a system in place for data ownership, especially for open data. I wonder who are the key players in this discussion? Are organizations like the NCBI, EBI, or the Wellcome Trust involved? I admire Google’s lead in this area, as well as Creative Commons, but the issue is a larger one for the scientific community and there should be more involvement, and more transparency. I suspect the greater scientific community is generally unaware of such efforts (based on purely anecdotal, empirical evidence) [...]
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