[open-science] [SCHOLCOMM] Libre open access, copyright, patent law, and, other intellectual property matters

[Ross Mounce]

Puneet's story reminds me very much of http://www.morphobank.org/ 's situation.

I've blogged about it before, here:
http://www.science3point0.com/palphy/2011/11/29/research-data-should-be-appropriately-licensed-with-re-use-in-mind/

First, I pointed out to them that need to provide explicit licence
details for the data they provide to avoid confusion.

My recommendation to them was CC-BY or CC0, but it was felt that many
of the 'best' museum institutions that could/ought to contribute data
to their database absolutely won't contribute *anything* under such
permissive licences. [Why this is the case, I do not know, but I
suspect it is true to a certain extent]

So they have adopted a system whereby data depositors can choose from
a range of licences when they click 'publish' (to make the data
publicly-accessible on the site). The trouble is - data depositors may
have misconceptions and misunderstandings about some licences and so
may make an, overly-conservative licence choice.

Given time, it might be interesting as a bit of research to see what
licence each user chose for their data - I'd like to think everyone
would choose CC-BY or CC0 (and some have already) but it'd be
interesting to know percentages...

Best,

Ross