[open-archaeology] Open Data from Oxford Archaeology

Mon Mar 22 18:00:05 UTC 2010

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your reply. You've raised a couple of very good points that
will be of relevance to wider groups. To be honest, I'm not paid to
come up with the policy, only to work on the technical details. I'll
answer as best as I can, however:

> While you have added the CC-BY-SA to the web-page, the documents itself (at
> least the few I had a look at) don't contain it. They were even saying that
> you need written authorisation by OA to use them.
> Shouldn't the CC-BY-SA be added to the documents as well? Otherwise you
> wouldn't know they were under CC-BY-SA, once the documents are taken from
> the web-site and passed on.

The majority of our reports, going back over 30 years, were produced
long before we had things like Creative Commons, PDF files or the
Internet; many of the reports represent old ways of working, or
thinking. Many of the reports contain spelling mistakes and some
particularly glaring errors. I don't want to change any of the
reports, however, as I'm as interested in the historiography of OA
reports as I am in the archaeological content of the reports
themselves, if not more so. Adding anything to these reports, even
something as innocuous a CC statement would change them in an
undesirable way.

The standard boilerplate disclaimer is intended, as far as I can tell,
to protect us against any possible liability rather than to limit the
use of reports:

"This document has been prepared for the titled project or named part
thereof and should not be relied upon or used for
any other project without an independent check being carried out as to
its suitability and prior written authority of
Oxford Archaeology being obtained."

> One document I had a look at contained Ordnance Survey Maps, with an
> explicit statement about their copyright.
> Don't you have to remove these and similar pictures, to make the document
> really free and open?

Again, I should highlight the fact that I work on the technical side
of this project rather than the policy before I touch on this point,
so take what I say with a pinch of salt. With that in mind, we have
not tried to relicense the OS imagery we have used and we are not
aiming to infringe on their intellectual property rights. OS maps were
originally reproduced under license and we remain an educational
charity. If anyone would like to raise copyright issues, however, we
have detailed the means by which this should happen:

http://library.thehumanjourney.net/information.html

Cheers, Joseph

On 22 March 2010 17:16, Michael Karl Pe Debets <debetsm at tcd.ie> wrote:
> Hi Joseph,
>
> Great work.
>
> Just two points I noticed when looking at some of the documents.
>
> While you have added the CC-BY-SA to the web-page, the documents itself (at
> least the few I had a look at) don't contain it. They were even saying that
> you need written authorisation by OA to use them.
> Shouldn't the CC-BY-SA be added to the documents as well? Otherwise you
> wouldn't know they were under CC-BY-SA, once the documents are taken from
> the web-site and passed on.
>
> One document I had a look at contained Ordnance Survey Maps, with an
> explicit statement about their copyright.
> Don't you have to remove these and similar pictures, to make the document
> really free and open?
>
> Bye
> Michael
>
>
> On 22 March 2010 16:13, Joseph Reeves <iknowjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Steko,
>>
>> I didn't receive your original reply to Chris' message via email
>> (although I did see it later), but it did prompt us to think a bit
>> more about licensing. Many of the documents already uploaded to the
>> site have been done so under a Creative Commons license, although it
>> seems that this isn't displayed on the Library. I have since changed
>> the footer on each page to say CC-BY-SA, hopefully making our Openess
>> a little more explicit.
>>
>> Cheers, Joseph
>>
>>
>>
>> On 22 March 2010 16:08, Stefano Costa <stefano.costa at okfn.org> wrote:
>> > Il giorno lun, 22/03/2010 alle 15.14 +0000, Joseph Reeves ha scritto:
>> >> Dear all,
>> >
>> > Hi Joseph,
>> > thanks for sharing this great initiative.
>> >
>> >> I'd like to invite you to a sneak preview of the Oxford Archaeology
>> >> Library site we've been working on here:
>> >>
>> >> http://library.thehumanjourney.net/
>> >
>> >
>> > I'd like to report a statement from Chris Puttick in reply to my
>> > specific question about licensing of contents:
>> >
>> >> > One important question: I see no explicit license for the documents
>> >> that> are available for download.
>> >> >
>> >> > While I hope the license can be open (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA for example
>> >> -
>> >> > http://opendefinition.org/ ), I would strongly recommend to state it
>> >> > explicitly, even if it is "all rights reserved" or anything else.
>> >> >
>> >> > An open license would allow for all kinds of derivative works, and I
>> >> see> a huge potential for OA Library in this direction.
>> >>
>> >> Fair point, never occurred to us because we're so deep into the open
>> >> archaeology thing; I guess we were assuming CC-BY-SA, proper
>> >> viral-like :)
>> >
>> > This sounds like one of the many good things about OA Library, and the
>> > most relevant for the discussion in this working group.
>> >
>> > Ciao,
>> > steko
>> >
>> > --
>> > Stefano Costa
>> >
>> > Coordinator, Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology
>> > http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/archaeology
>> > The Open Knowledge Foundation
>> > http://www.okfn.org
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > open-archaeology mailing list
>> > open-archaeology at lists.okfn.org
>> > http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-archaeology
>> >
>> >
>>
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