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
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--
Allyson Lister
http://themindwobbles.wordpress.com
CISBAN, http://www.cisban.ac.uk
Newcastle University
