[open-science] Fwd: Open data and Panton Principles

[Cameron Neylon]

> Speaking as someone who agreed such a restriction in the past, as the then
> Director of the Digital Curation Centre: we had an obligation to pursue
> "sustainability" as an explicit part of our funding conditions. On that basis,
> we decided that our default licence would be CC-BY-NC-SA. Our reasoning was
> that if there was money to be made from our resources, our sustainability
> obligation meant we had to try to be part of it. Putting a NC restriction
> doesn't mean "no commercial use, ever". It means "no commercial use unless you
> discuss with us the terms and conditions".

Only have a moment but a quick response. The core argument on this point
revolves around the issue of the opportunity costs involved in a) having NC
licences and b) not acting as a catalyst to persuade _others_ to _not_ use
NC licences vs the potential income to be generated.

Overall for government data it has been shown in many situations that the
net community return on giving data away is greater than that when you try
and sell it. In several cases it has been shown that more money is made by
the providers in question when they give data away. The best demonstrator of
this has been the big database companies in the US are more profitable than
EU ones despite (or perhaps because of) EU database rights.

Of course these things are hard to estimate but to the extent that it is
true it is reasonable to expect it to be _more_ true for data than for other
objects (like text) which don't gain much more value in aggregate in the way
data does.

The sad truth is that while many people feel "if anyone is going to make
money on this then we should" the reality is that no-one ends up making any
money at all. Where we are talking about public investment focussing on
sustainability can actually be a barrier to maximising ROI which is the true
route to ultimate sustainability because it means that value is being
created which will ultimately support further creation (and curation).

Will try to respond to the original query in a bit more detail later.

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