Assigning CC-BY-4.0 licence to CIF dictionaries

[James H]

Hi Stephen - Thanks for the insight into the wwPDB thinking around CC0. Has
the wwPDB assigned any particular licence to the mmCIF-PDBx dictionary, or
has there been discussion around this in the past? I wasn't able to find
any information on the mmcif.pdb.org website.

all the best,
James.

On Wed, 3 Apr 2024 at 20:16, Stephen K. Burley, M.D., D.Phil. <
sburley at proteomics.rutgers.edu> wrote:

> Thank you for your message James.
>
> The choice of CC0 for wwPDB data, etc. was driven in large part by strong
> recommendations from the leadership of the European. Informatics Institute
> (EBI).
>
> It was clear to me that their preference was for all data resources
> associated with EBI to adopt CC0.
>
> I have no objections to CC-BY-4.0 for CIF.
>
> As a practical matter, I believe that the terms of CC-BY-4.0 are
> unenforceable, and this license is in effect equivalent to CC-0.
>
> Happy to discuss further in a zoom call as needed.
>
> Thank you for all of your efforts on behalf of IUCr,  COMCIFS, and data
> standards for crystallography.
>
> Be safe and be successful Stephen
>
> Stephen K. Burley, M.D., D.Phil.
> University Professor and Henry Rutgers Chair
> Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
>
> V (Morse Code: …*)
> Victory Against Fascism
>
> On Apr 3, 2024, at 12:09 AM, James H via comcifs <comcifs at iucr.org> 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 and the
> statement of IUCr policy originating at that time is at
> 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/ 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.
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