Assigning CC-BY-4.0 licence to CIF dictionaries

[Brian McMahon]

I confirm that CC-BY-4.0 would fit in with the projected workflow that
the Chester office has in place for assigning DOIs to future releases
of the dictionaries.

Two corollaries:

(1) Should we then have a _dictionary.licence term in the DDLm dictionary?
    That would advertise the licence explicitly upon opening the dictionary.
    Perhaps one also needs a _dictionary.licence_url to allow the full
    content of the licence to be retrieved?
(2) If so, we can enforce a single enumeration value (CC-BY-4.0) or we can
    allow additional values (if the community needs that for the exemptions
    that might be required e.g. by funding bodies as James mentions).

Brian


On 03/04/2024 05:09, James H via comcifs wrote:
> Dear COMCIFS,
> 
> It may come as some surprise that no licence is attached to our
> dictionaries. As these are machine-readable, they are available for
> other automated ontology-management systems (e.g. EMMO) to ingest and
> transform, however, the lack of a licence opens them up to perceived
> legal jeopardy. From time to time in the past licensing has been raised
> but not followed through on, the latest as far as I can tell being 2011.
> An educational thread from 1999 can be read
> https://www.iucr.org/__data/iucr/lists/comcifs-l/msg00032.html
> <https://www.iucr.org/__data/iucr/lists/comcifs-l/msg00032.html> and the
> statement of IUCr policy originating at that time is at
> https://www.iucr.org/resources/cif/comcifs/policy
> <https://www.iucr.org/resources/cif/comcifs/policy>
> 
> Since that time, Creative Commons have produced licences for material
> that is intended to be shared. These licenses are designed to work
> across international legal systems. The two which seem most appropriate
> to us are CC0 (public domain), which is essentially renouncing all
> rights conferred by copyright, and CC-BY, which does the same, but
> requires attribution and that any changes to the original are clearly
> indicated. I urge you to have a look at
> https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/
> <https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/> for background on
> creative commons.
> 
> Having pondered the above, I would like now to propose that our
> dictionaries are licensed as CC-BY, for the following reasons, based on
> the decision points in the Creative Commons "chooser" tool:
> 
> 1. We need to pick a licence for clarity (see above)
> 2. CC0 (public domain) would theoretically allow somebody to take our
> dictionaries and claim them as their own or to distribute subtly but
> incorrectly modified versions. Note that the wwPDB does license their
> data as CC0, so this concern on my part may be misguided, particularly
> in a scientific community where the IUCr is an authoritative source
> 3. We do not wish to restrict use of our dictionaries for commercial
> purposes, for example, if a diffractometer manufacturer wished to bundle
> a dictionary and add their own data names to it, they should not need to
> spend their time or our time gaining permission. Simply following the
> rules for attribution and flagging modifications should be enough.
> 4. Transformation and adaptation of our dictionaries is an increasingly
> common approach as neighbouring disciplines realise that they can save a
> lot of time (e.g. the ongoing EMMO work). Allowing this type of
> modification is just normal scientific practice, where one group builds
> on the openly available results of other groups, so we should not
> restrict it
> 5. We could require that any modified versions are published under the
> same licence, which would then make it CC-BY-ShareAlike. My opinion is
> that this type of restriction just introduces friction, for example,
> some funding body may require all outputs to be licensed according to
> some quite liberal licence that is not clearly compatible with
> CC-BY-ShareAlike, and so there's a need to seek an exemption.
> 
> Please discuss. Those with insight into the wwPDB's choice of CC0 are
> welcome to weigh in. If there are no outstanding objections by the end
> of the month I will take that as agreement.
> 
> best wishes,
> James.