[open-science] Openness and Licensing of (Open) Data

Mon Feb 9 16:34:44 UTC 2009

On Mon, 9 Feb 2009, Rufus Pollock wrote:

>> statement would look a lot like a license and would aim to have the legal
>> effect of at least providing clarity over the rights of users to copy,
>> re-purpose, and fork the objects in question.
>
> So what happens when you get incompatibility of 'norms'. Does
> 'flexibility' mean I can just ignore the norms as I see fit?

If that's true, then it's not a norm.  You pay a price for norm violation 
-- e.g., the price paid by people who violate norms by plagiarizing other 
people's work.  Of course, that price can only be extracted on people who 
are inside the community where the norm is in force; people outside that 
community can flout the norm largely with impunity.

An example of the kind of norm incompatability you're talking about occurs 
in cross-disciplinary field, when the different fields have different 
norms.  To pick an example I've seen up close, in the theoretical computer 
science community authors on papers are usually ordered alphabetically by 
surname.  In theoretical physics, author ordering is used to convey 
information about contribution, and it can be very important (sometimes 
the deciding factor, in extreme cases) for jobs etc.  This norm 
incompatability can cause considerable difficulties when people from the 
two communities collaborate.  Much though certainly not all of that 
difficulty can be overcome by negotiation.

Michael