[open-science] Share Alike? Or not?

Thu Jun 14 14:51:33 UTC 2012

Blush.  Yes, PDDL.

Not a miner myself, so hard for me to know whether it is a frequent or serious problem.  A good question that deserves more than mere assertion.

There are possible solutions but we don't have any consensus on whether they would be acceptable to authors.  As you suggest, one could throw all the citations into an attribution database -- whether or not data from any particular source was actually used -- and link to it from the resulting article/re-use.  But if the article is distributed/archived in hard copy version, authors may feel that this pushes them too far away from readers to get the recognition they would get if their name actually appeared in footnotes of the hard copy.   What if the link rots?  What if the final re-use only uses about 4% of all those cite-in-case-of-doubt sources?  Would that not be confusing to those who attempt to reproduce results? I don't know.  Not technically gifted enough.  

And the precise presentation of the citation could be more burdensome if, for example, the author requires any special format (as is possible with CC BY) or if all of the required citation elements are not easily obtainable.
dc

On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:44 PM, Rufus Pollock wrote:

> On 14 June 2012 14:31, Diane Cabell <dc at icommons.org> wrote:
> [...]
>> Attribution stacking is a serious problem for those who are trying to mine
>> large collections of data.  It can be difficult to track small bits that are
>> pulled out from different sources.  The list of authors to attribute might
>> be longer than the article itself.  Consider using CC Zero or ODbL for your
>> data.
> 
> Has anyone actually ever found attribution stacking to be a problem? I
> hear it said quite frequently that this *could* be a problem but it
> seems to be me there are fairly easy ways to deal with "attribution
> stacking" so don't think this is really an issue (for more detail on
> why see these comments from a few years ago:
> <http://blog.okfn.org/2009/02/09/comments-on-the-science-commons-protocol-for-implementing-open-access-data/>).
> 
> Also, as a minor aside, I assume you meant the PDDL (Public Domain
> Dedication and License) rather than the ODbL in this context (ODbL =
> Attribution / Share-Alike for data).
> 
> Rufus