[open-bibliography] BL data available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

[Jim Pitman]

Edmund Chamberlain <emc59 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> Apologies if this has been posted and missed:
> http://www.librarytechnology.org/ltg-displaytext.pl?RC=15024
>
> Sample of data here:
> http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/rdfdcsample.xml
>
> Granularity issues aside, its a great development.

Yes, this looks terrific. From http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/datafree.html
I see 

Files are distributed under a 
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. 
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

This seems to me a reasonable choice for biblio metadata, and one there is
some hope of getting big non-profit data providers to use.
I dont see any significant downside to the "NonCommercial" feature, and
"ShareAlike" seems OK too. 

However, the "Users are required to register for the service and agree ..."
is a bit strange, and does not seem consistent with the license.  Are re-users
of the data required also to register with BNL?
It would be interesting to see a copy of the registration agreement.
How about OKFN registering as a user and hosting a copy with easier access? 
Or Thomas, how about hosting on 3lib?
--Jim

----------------------------------------------
Jim Pitman
Director, Bibliographic Knowledge Network Project
http://www.bibkn.org/

Professor of Statistics and Mathematics
University of California
367 Evans Hall # 3860
Berkeley, CA 94720-3860

ph: 510-642-9970  fax: 510-642-7892
e-mail: pitman at stat.berkeley.edu
URL: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/users/pitman