Hi all, This is an interesting point - thanks for bringing it to the community, Catherine!
Though I am not a developer of CellML models, but rather a user of them (in the bioinformatics, data integration sense), I have a few points to make that might help this discussion. I have spent a lot of time thinking about licensing with respect to ontologies, which are similar beasts in terms of licensing, IMHO. Firstly: the distinction between *attribution* and *citation*. At the risk of tooting my own horn, me and a colleague Frank Gibson have written about this in the context of the life sciences here: http://themindwobbles.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/attribution-vs-citation-do-you-know-the-difference/. Basically, what I would like people to get from this point is that you need to carefully define what the goal is that you want to achieve with the terms of model distribution. Secondly: licensing (which guarantees attribution, but not necessarily citation). The most common requirement mentioned in the links below is attribution. Some have suggested GPL, others the CC-BY license. I would like to suggest that you do NOT use GPL. Although the name "viral" may be misleading, it is true that if a 3rd party wants to use your GPL-licensed models, that if you create a software program that *is a derived work of another software program, then that combined work must be distributed under these terms*. This means that you are restricting everyone down the line to using GPL. I would suggest a variant of the Creative Commons license, such as CC-BY. However, Creative Commons is explictly NOT designed for software. Here, you run into the same problem I had with figuring out a license for ontologies: are ontologies - and models - software or documents? It is my impression (and one that seems to be backed up by the Science Commons folks) that these are indeed documents, and would be suitable for CC. CC allows you to choose a license that isn't defined by any particular country. CC-BY forces attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) while CC-BY-SA (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) enforces attribution and for people to use similar, compatible (but not identical) licensing. (btw, it seems the BioModels terms of use are here, and might be worth a read: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/biomodels-main/termsofuse) Thirdly: attribution stacking. While it is a good idea (it's what I do) to require attribution in your license, because CellML models may be incorporated one into another into another into another etc, you may get the situation very quickly where it becomes rather unwieldy to ensure everything has been attributed properly. Conversely, if each model gets the attribution right each time, it may not be such a high wall to climb after all. The Science Commons people have something to say about this in general: http://themindwobbles.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/science-commons-provide-a-list-of-considerations-for-researchers-looking-to-license-their-ontology/. The link I provide here is about ontologies, but the broad points remain important. Finally, do you want links to the other model URIs, or to the DOIs of the papers they're described in? I'm guessing the former, as perhaps the latter will be included in the model's metadata anyway? However, model authors may be more keen, in terms of # of citations being an important metric, to see a DOI put in instead. Not sure, would have to ask the modellers themselves. Hope this helps, and sorry for the length - I didn't intend it to be so long when I started! :) allyson 2009/12/1 Catherine Lloyd <[email protected]> > Dear All > > We are looking towards using the MIRIAM Standard for the basic set of > CellML model curation flags. In order to do this we need to consider how we > are going to address the following point: > > "Is the model linked to a precise statement about the terms of > distribution?" > > This issue has been raised at an Auckland CellML team meeting: > > http://www.cellml.org/community/meeting/minutes/2009/11.25 > > And it has also been discussed (briefly) on the Physiome tracker: > > https://tracker.physiomeproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2056 > > Before we come up with a definite solution to this problem we would like to > open up the discussion further and invite the community to add any comments > they might have to this tracker item. > > Thank you in advance for your thoughts and ideas! > > Best wishes > Catherine > > _______________________________________________ > cellml-discussion mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.cellml.org/mailman/listinfo/cellml-discussion > -- Allyson Lister http://themindwobbles.wordpress.com CISBAN, http://www.cisban.ac.uk Newcastle University
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