[open-linguistics] META-NET Data Liberation Campaign

[Nancy Ide]

I would like to raise a concern here that calling for "open for research" licensing is potentially damaging to our interests, in the sense that it promotes a practice that is counter to what I assume (hope) is the overall goal: fully open data, restricted to no one for any purpose and thereby supportive of collaborative development across both nonprofit and commercial organizations. Given the EU's promotion of collaboration between research and industry in their funding model, it would seem that this would be in the interest of the official language bodies in Europe as well. 

A look at the impact of the promotion of GNU (copyleft) and "share-alike" licenses makes my point: promotion of these licenses as the "good citizen's license" has had a subtle but pervasive impact on software and data licensing, in that these licenses are at this point the de facto licenses of choice. Unfortunately, such licenses are often not suitable for commercial use because of the requirement to distribute results under the same terms. So what we have is a grass roots effort to be open that in fact has had the result of obstructing full openness. I fear that the promotion of the even stronger research-only restriction will have a similar, and even more damaging, effect.

I would recommend promotion of something like the Apache 2.0 license (http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0), even if (as pointed out in the note below) it is not likely that such a license would be acceptable in this instance. That would send the message that a fully open license is what the community feels is the good citizen's choice, in that it supports collaborative development among both nonprofit and commercial organizations. If there cannot be agreement to adopt this type of licensing, so be it, but the message from the community should be clear about what we see as the ideal.

Nancy Ide

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Nancy Ide
Professor of Computer Science

Department of Computer Science
Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, New York 12604-0520 
USA

tel: (+1 845) 437 5988
fax: (+1 845) 437 7498
email: ide at cs.vassar.edu
http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~ide
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On Dec 3, 2012, at 7:25 PM, Christian Chiarcos <christian.chiarcos at web.de> wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> as most of us probably know, a number of "reference corpora" for major (and minor) languages of Europe that have been produced in the last decades, but many of them are not fully available to the public (not even under a restrictive license), or available in a snippet view on the web only (and hence unusable for NLP or advanced statistical analyses), -- not to talk about open licenses.
> 
> To address this issue, META-NET have prepared an open letter to all the official language bodies in Europe and to those holding onto the various corpora calling on them to consider trying to make this important language data available for research purposes.  If you feel that there is a huge benefit to liberating these corpora and making them available for research then please contact your local language body and let them know that you are in favour of the META-NET proposal.
> 
> More on this can be found on our blog, in a recent post by John Judge, META-NET Ireland (http://linguistics.okfn.org/2012/11/19/meta-net-data-liberation-campaign/, from where the last paragraph was quoted). I'd like to thank John for replicating his original post there and hope this initiative receives some support from the OWLG.
> 
> Certainly, making these resources available under a research license would not be sufficient in the eyes of many on the list, but it would definitely be an important (and more easily achievable) step towards the further liberation of linguistic data.
> 
> Thank you,
> Christian
> -- 
> Christian Chiarcos
> Information Sciences Institute
> University of Southern California
> 4676 Admiralty Way #1001
> Marina del Rey, CA 90292
> tel: +1-310-448-9391
> fax: +1-310-448-8599
> http://purl.org/chiarcos/home
> chiarcos at isi.edu
> 
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