[odc-discuss] Questions about ODC licenses and web site

Thu Jul 7 19:17:50 UTC 2011

On 7 July 2011 19:08, Peter B. Hirtle <pbh6 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> On Thursday, 07 July, at 1:52 PM, Richard Weait wrote:
>
>
>
> Sure. Many people and groups make unreasonable claims for attribution.
>
> The scientific community already have expectations for credit when building
> on previous work in the form of citing sources.  Why would attribution
> credit be required for the data, in addition to what is already required for
> the previous work as a whole?
>
>
>
> Consider using PDDL for both data and database.  When applied to the data,
> PDDL makes clear that a consumer of the data may use it in any way.  If
> another scientist builds upon the previous work, they are already expected
> to cite the source.
>
>
>
> Peter Hirtle’s response:
>
> I personally would agree with you.  I think that science is better when
> there is as much sharing as possible.  But some scientists believe that
> others should not be able to free-ride on their sweat and labors.  If this
> wasn’t the case, attribution licenses would not be the norm.  So in order to
> be able to get this scientist to deposit his data in a shared repository, we
> need to be able to legally guarantee that he gets credit for the creation of
> the data content.  If we can’t, he won’t deposit.  Unfortunately, there are
> no generic licenses that I can find that allow for attribution for content.

To go back to my email reply: could you clarify a bit more what you
mean by content and what the exact situation is. From what you've said
so far I'm not clear why you couldn't use a suitable license but that
may be because I don't understand the problem exactly.

Rufus