[okfn-discuss] Licensing question from the Open Science Training Initiative pilot

Wed Jan 16 11:18:58 UTC 2013

Hi everyone,

As many of you will know, I'm currently running the pilot scheme for my Open Science Training Initiative at the Doctoral Training Centre, University of Oxford. Pre-doctoral students have received a variety of lectures on different aspects of open science and associated issues, including licensing, open access, DMPs and version control. The OSTI requires the students to work on computational research problems in groups, rotating the problems midway through the assessment so that the successor group has to take said project forward based ONLY on the (fully licensed) materials released to them by their predecessor group.

The students have taken to licensing fantastically well, even though the concept was completely new to *all* of them this time last week. Yesterday I fielded a more specific question from one of the students and was hoping some of the legal eagles on this list might be able to help.

The student in question has developed a series of his own routines in Matlab and has drawn them together in a GUI, which he has also designed. He wanted to take a screenshot of this GUI and put it into his report. However, he wasn't sure how this should be licensed. If parts of the Mathworks Matlab interface are visible as part of his screenshot, would this preclude him putting say, a CC-BY license on the resulting image?

Thanks for your help everyone! Once I get the chance to sit down at my computer for long enough, I should be blogging about the OSTI, so keep an eye out for further info - and feel free to get in touch with me directly if you have any further questions!

All the best,

Sophie