Hi All,

Reviving this thread just to share the news that the CODATA-Research Data 
Alliance’s Group on Legal Interoperability of Research Data has released our 
Principles and Guidelines for Legal Interoperability 
(https://rd-alliance.org/group/rdacodata-legal-interoperability-ig/post/legal-interoperability-research-data-principles-and),
 and the take-home message is that CC0 or CC-BY are the recommended options 
(affirming Elizabeth’s approach!) We note that CC0 is actually a waiver of 
rights, not a license, and that with this option attribution may best be 
handled through professional norms and expectations.

The document reflects 2 years of analysis by the group’s members – researchers, 
lawyers (including Counsel for Creative Commons, agency managers, and one 
librarian) – and extensive external review. The perspectives that informed this 
work have considered global IP regimes, including moral rights provisions in 
some nations and EU Database Protection requirements.

Our analysis recognizes that while CC0 is the optimal choice to remove legal 
barriers, CC-BY may make sense in some cases, where the data is more thickly 
protected by copyright (say, textual or image data used by humanists or 
biodiversity researchers). We also note that research institutions with IP 
policies requiring that open data and open software release be accompanied by a 
disclaimer may need to add additional language to rights statements.

Anyways, happy to answer questions about the Principles and Recommendations 
from RDA-CODATA.

Cheers,

Gail (new Carpentry partner!)


Gail P. Clement  | Head of Research Services  | Caltech Library  | Mail Code 
1-43  | Pasadena CA 91125-4300  | 626-395-1203
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5494-4806 | library.caltech.edu



From: Discuss [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf 
Of E.W.
Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2016 9:43 AM
To: Matthias Nilsson <[email protected]>
Cc: Software Carpentry Discussion <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Discuss] Best practices for licensing data?

Hi Matthias,

A big part of my job is attempting to answer this question for researchers at 
my (US) university and as part of on a team developing a data repository.

I've done some analysis on the licenses that are used by datasets within 
DataCite records.  As of December 2015 when I scraped the data in, 59% of the 
records had a rights statement and 95% of those were in the Creative commons 
family.  Yanking more out of my slides, when looking at the CC uses: 62% 
CC-BY-NC; 36% CC-BY; 1% CC0; <1% other.  These numbers are heavily biased 
towards specific repositories using stock licenses for all their records and 
having a high volume of records, so these should not be interpreted as data 
representing the self-deposit data world.

CC has a nice wizard to select a license from, but CC0 or CCBY are usually the 
ones we (the data repository team I work in) try to recommend to people for 
open data.  I can provided unapologetically biased opinions about which to use, 
but I shall refrain unless prodded.

There may be a domain repository that specializes in this kind of data and they 
likely have some recommendations.  As far as adding it goes, most repositories 
just have a declaration on the splash page for the dataset, within the 
metadata, and sometimes a copy of the license as part of the file set.

But to focus more on the third item, please do consider formally depositing 
this into a data repository of some sort (versus just having a public github 
repo).  Zenodo has hooks to github and issues out DataCite metadata when it 
generates the DOI.  Figshare does this as well, but Zenodo has better editing 
capabilities for the metadata.  I'm happy to brain dump about this more offline 
for the curious of if you're confused as to how to use the elements (this is an 
open offer to anyone on there wrangling with datacite metadata).

As far as other considerations about the question of making things public, it 
depends on the source and content of the data.

1) Is work on the content creation and edit of these data files done?  You 
don't want to potentially be changing content under people's feet if they are 
working with the data.  There are ways to version the data and I can expand on 
this if it is an issue.

2) Are there any data sensitivities?  For example: Is this human subject data?  
Could this potentially have a harmful impact on any subjects?  Looks like these 
are just models, so likely not, but always consider this.

3) Are there any contractual or licensing sensitivities for making this open?  
For example, are these data files derived from a source with restrictions on 
such derivatives?  Any other contracts or IP issues with tools used or the 
University in regards to licensing?  University IP concerns are highly variable 
by local laws and policies, but something to consider if they would want to 
have a stake in this.

Just some things to chew on.

Elizabeth
(Data Curation Specialist, Research Data Service, University of Illinois)

On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 11:05 AM, Matthias Nilsson 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi,

I got a question at work today that I felt unable to answer, so I
thought I'd pass the question on to more knowledgeable people.

At my institution we have a set of metabolic models, which are
basically descriptions of reactions and metabolites and so on, stored
in an SBML[0] file. Internally, we have started to move them to
private Git repositories, but would now like to make them public.

As far as we can tell, there are no requirements from the institution
or the university on which type of license to choose, apart from that
the data should be "open".

So what I'd like to know is this:

1. What licenses are recommended for data? I've looked at Creative
Commons and Open Data Commons, but I suspect that there may be more.

2. How do we actually license things? Is it enough to add a file
called LICENSE to the repository and point to it in the README?

3. Is there anything else that we should consider when making the
transition from private to public?


Best regards,
Matthias


[0] A format based on XML.
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