Hi! You may want to look at work in licensing by Victoria Stodden, see
http://www.stanford.edu/~vcs/ Best, Hans Allyson Lister wrote: > 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] > <mailto:[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] <mailto:[email protected]> > http://www.cellml.org/mailman/listinfo/cellml-discussion > > > > > -- > Allyson Lister > http://themindwobbles.wordpress.com > > CISBAN, http://www.cisban.ac.uk > Newcastle University > -- Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser Associate Professor Dept. of Mathematical Sciences and Technology Norwegian University of Life Sciences Phone +47 6496 5467 Fax +47 6496 5401 Email [email protected] Home http://arken.umb.no/~plesser _______________________________________________ cellml-discussion mailing list [email protected] http://www.cellml.org/mailman/listinfo/cellml-discussion
