[open-science] Share Alike? Or not?

Fri Jun 15 07:35:35 UTC 2012

Attribution is legally mandated for re-use of copyrighted work in most  European jurisdictions under moral rights legislation.  If you are copying a substantial portion of another's work, you must identify that author.   I'm not well enough versed in Euro law to know whether attribution is required when insubstantial portions are used or if it is required when only database rights apply.  Would welcome instruction on those points.

Independently of the statutory law, repositories may require attribution/citation as a contractual condition of access and may specify the format for doing so.

Academic citation is different from attribution in many ways including that the authors credited in journal articles are often not 'authors' as the term is legally defined by copyright law.  A legal author is one who actually contributes to the actual writing of the article.  Also, the legal author may be the employer where the work was produced as part of job performance.  Citation may be the norm whether or not the subsequent user copies any of the original article, e.g., when the analysis produced in the original work contributes to the current user's thinking but quoting any of the specific language appearing in the original article.

dc

On Jun 14, 2012, at 6:25 PM, Carl Boettiger wrote:

> I believe I've encountered problems with attribution stacking. Citations that appear only in the supplement of journals are frequently not counted in the major commercial citation metrics indices, and many journals limit the number of citations.
> 
> For instance, I programmatically pull data from fishbase.org, which claims that its content is cc-by-nc, and asks that I attribute authors of the original paper in which the data was reported.  Since the queries need to look at all the data to report the subset of numbers that match my query, shouldn't I probably cite all 47,300 references and not just the hundreds of sources that provide the final data?  
> 
> Perhaps more importantly, I find the connection between an attribution license and an academic citation confusing.  Isn't citation is a cultural norm, not a legal requirement of copyright?  An attribution license requires that I acknowledge the author in some unspecified way (i.e. it isn't clear that I need to acknowledge them in a way that boosts their citation count in ISI), if I share or remix and share their work.  When I cite an academic paper, I am not sharing or remixing work.  I feel uncomfortable with the use of an attribution license to "enforce" citation practices.  If attribution doesn't equate to academic citation, then perhaps the problem of "stacking" is more negligible.
> 
> On the other hand, if in using data from the repository I should attribute both the repository and the original source, than the attribution stacking problem introduced by copyright is a greater burden than the attribution problem introduced by citation practices.  Is this any different than citing a review or meta-analysis that determines "92 out of 120 studies showed x" without citing the original articles?  When the goal of citation was only reproducible research, there is no need to stack those citations since it is easy to follow the chain.  But if the copyright license on the data enforces citing all elements in the chain, then it is the terms of copyright, not citation norms, which pose the greater burden of stacking.  
> 
> Confused myself,
> 
> -Carl
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 7:51 AM, Diane Cabell <dc at icommons.org> wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
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> 
> 
> -- 
> Carl Boettiger
> UC Davis
> http://www.carlboettiger.info/
> 

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