Open science and licensing
August 11, 2007
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
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