Following discussion on the SPARC Open Data list I got a mail:
I’d like to hear more discussion on open data, too. In particular, what are the practical approaches that will help adoption of open data by researchers themselves? ...
PMR: The simplest think that researchers can do is to add a Creative Commons license to their data. It costs nothing, is a simple cut-and-paste, and could be trivially made a template in any data production tool....
Similarly scientific software developers could output the additional line: “The data output by this program are offered under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license” (or better in a machine-readable XML/RDF format like the creative commons already do).
We might add the following:
“The authors regard these as not copyrightable Open Data. Some publishers wish to claim that if published alongside a journal article they own the copyright on them. This license effectively forbids them to claim copyright without the authors permission and acquiescence."
I think the effect of this would be dramatic. Scientists would start to see these messages and think: “Why should I give these data to the publisher?” And if the publisher simply adds a copyright notice saying “all these data are copyright the publisher - you cannot use them for X, Y, Z without permission” this would be in violation of the authors’ license. The author would have to deliberately remove this statement to hand over the IPR to the publisher....
If the scientific programmers buy into this it is unstoppable.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/12/2006 11:44:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
