[open-archaeology] Open licenses for archaeological data matter: the case of AustArch

Wed Jul 30 13:27:04 UTC 2014

Thanks Michael,

Your stepping in is much appreciated. I think you are right in two aspects FUD and changes in definition. In respect of FUD: I'm not trying to spread Fear, but there is definitely Uncertainty and Doubt (more of the former that the latter). The removal or reduction of the uncertainty and doubt is where this kind of discussion should be focussed. I hope your shorthand licence starts to remove some of this ambiguity.

We should try to move organisation like the ADS into a fully Open position -  it would be a good aspiration to move you from being open in your hearts to being open in your deeds (at least from a technical and licence perspective). Without wishing to spread more FUD your licence does appear to go against the directions espoused by Open Government (and Francis Mause) and RCUK.  That said I also appreciate that a wholesale licence migration is not an easy thing (it caused a lot of pain for Open Street Map) and may not be realistic. For DART our originally released data licence on our portal is more open than the ADS licence. As long as the ADS reference the data they consumed (from the portal) and respect our by-attribution licence constraint then any re-users can see that the ADS have harvested data that is available under a more favourable licence (assuming the data is available in perpetuity - I am working on that). The perpetuity element is the ADS trump card.

<snip>
In summary, we are aware our T&Cs cause confusion and it is our responsibility to clarify them more,
</snip>

can this community help in this?

Best

A

________________________________
From: open-archaeology [open-archaeology-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Michael Charno [michael.charno at york.ac.uk]
Sent: 30 July 2014 11:20
To: open-archaeology at lists.okfn.org
Subject: Re: [open-archaeology] Open licenses for archaeological data matter: the case of AustArch

Hi List, token ADS staff member here.  Just wanted to clarify (and defend) a few things related to all of this.

First of all in reply to Stefano's original suggestion that we don't allow professional archaeologists to re-use our data.  Our T&C's clearly state:
By research we mean any work undertaken for the advancement of archaeological knowledge and/or the understanding of the historic environment. Such work may be commercially sponsored or it may be funded by academic bodies or learned societies, or it may be unsupported: but it is a condition of use that the results are placed in the public domain and are made freely available for others to use according to the normal principles of professional and academic practice.
The slight contradiction is later we use the term "non-commercial" in the document, which when our T&C's were drafted almost 20 years ago did not have the meaning it does today.  The AHRC lawyers that drafted our T&C's defined this as not-for-resale as opposed to the CC definition of non-commercial.  It is our fault for not more actively asserting this and making this more clear to our users and Open Data proponents such as yourselves.  We are going to be publishing a CC style shorthand license to make this more human readable and easier to understand.

In reply to Ant's snippet, there is no "NC clause" in our T&C's other than using the term "non-commercial" (which as i said has a very different definitions in the two licenses).  That hardly equates to a very loaded implication of having an "NC clause".  An analogy would be the meaning of "pants" in Britain and America, there is a clear definition in each context what "pants" means, but it would be silly for British people to be upset at Americans for wearing "pants" in public.  Most of the rest of the assertion in that snippet is FUD in my opinion and is only focused on a narrow and incorrect definition of one term rather than the whole document.

More generally it should also be emphasised that we are first and foremost an archive (with a web front end).  The ADS T&Cs are companions to the deposit license, which has to take into account the preservation and long-term archival activities in addition to the dissemination.  This is something that the CC licenses don't suitably cover at all.  This is also part of the reason that we have been hesitant to move to CC licenses or a mixed model.  >From a management standpoint it is much easier to deal with one license regime rather than multiple or a mixed models.  We also don't see much advantage over our current license to the CC ones, other than a small group of people being able to take data we host and re-sell it.  We take on board that we don't technically fit the "Open Data" definition that Stefano pointed out, but in our hearts we will always be part of the Open Data movement...

All of this is as we at the ADS understand it, based on what the original AHRC lawyers told us.  And as we don't have a legal people on payroll or immediate access to them, we will have to assume the guidance and advice we originally received still holds true.

In summary, we are aware our T&Cs cause confusion and it is our responsibility to clarify them more, which this conversation is helping us to do.  We also understand the desire for standardization of licenses and language, but at this stage it would be very costly and time-consuming to make wholesale and retroactive changes.  If we were starting today we would have most likely drafted the deposit license to be a companion or compatible with the CC licenses.  We also regret having the term "non-commercial" being used in our license, but we will better highlight our definition as there is clearly misunderstanding amongst the community.

Hope this all makes sense and alleviates some of the issues/concerns, now if you don't mind i'm just going to get my flak jacket on and retreat to the ADS bunker...

michael

___________________________________________________________

Michael Charno
Lead Applications Developer

Archaeology Data Service
Department of Archaeology
University of York                  Tel: +44 (0)1904 323967
King's Manor                        Fax: +44 (0)1904 323939
York
YO1 7EP

Disclaimer  http://www.york.ac.uk/docs/disclaimer/email.htm
___________________________________________________________

On 30/07/14 09:19, Bevan, Andrew wrote:

Agreed that this is an important issue. Anyone mind if we informally point a couple of people at ADS to this list discussion to get their input?

 Andy

On 30 Jul 2014, at 02:34, Ben Marwick <bmarwick at uw.edu><mailto:bmarwick at uw.edu> wrote:

I know the lead author and have raised this question with him. He's looking into it and notes that the main reason for the choice was that the ADS license was recommended by the Internet Archaeology journal. He has made the same dataset available elsewhere on the web (with no license).

On 29/7/2014 11:53 PM, Stefano Costa wrote:

Dear all,
this list is admittedly not very active, however I'd like to share some
observations I made about the terms of service of the Archaeology Data
Service, that started from a discussion on Twitter:

http://archaeology.okfn.org/2014/07/29/open-licenses-for-archaeological-data-matter-the-case-of-austarch/

In short: I think custom licenses such as the ADS terms of use are
archaeological remains and should be replaced by standard, open
licenses. As Colleen Morgan succinctly put it:

        What about the professional archaeologists among us?
        They need media [and data] too.

Perhaps we could gather more comments on this and see if there is
momentum towards a wider action?

All the best, ciao
Stefano
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