[open-science] State of "Is it Open Data"?

Tue Aug 31 13:30:38 UTC 2010

> On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 2:42 PM, Heather Piwowar <hpiwowar at gmail.com> wrote:
>> PMR and I (on behalf of OKN) sent a few IsItOpenData enquiries yesterday
>> (BMC, PLoS, Nature, Mendeley), and already have one very positive response
>> from PLoS.
> 
> I do not fully understand the response... at one place I think they
> say the data is CC-BY and at other places they say it is conform the
> Panton Principles (CC0 or PDDL or any other public domain waiver)...
> which is it?

We've got a long way to go in making clear all of these distinctions. And at
the same time we don't want to put off those people acting in good faith
either. I know there are initiatives at both BMC and PLoS looking at how to
handle this. It will require changes to the licensing arrangements (to have
authors explicitly make data, intepreted generously as PD) as well as
changes to the declarations made on each paper so its going to be tough but
I think working with PLoS and BMC to come up with some good examples of how
it can be done is the way forward here.

BMC are for instance putting Open-Data buttons on figures and supplementary
data but while this is a nice declaration of what you can do it needs to be
backed up with a licence/waiver that makes it happen. To do that you need to
modify the publication agreements between author and publisher to make
explicit the licensing arrangements for different components of the overall
work. Which can't be done retrospectively really. So lots of work for the
future.

Cheers

Cameron

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