Assigning CC-BY-4.0 licence to CIF dictionaries

[James H]

Taking up this topic again. The discussion is essentially whether or not
CC-BY or CC-BY-SA is best for a CIF dictionary license.

On Thu, 4 Apr 2024 at 16:12, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> Wikimedia material is all CC BY-SA and it works. There's a lot of
> experience there.
>

Well, over fifty percent of the open access journals registered by the
Directory of Open Access Journals use CC-BY, including our very own IUCrJ,
with CC BY-SA at less than 10% (see doaj.org search page). Are our
dictionaries more like journal articles or wikipedia pages? I think they
are more like journal articles, because they are carefully written
scholarly works. They do share characteristics of Wikipedia pages in that
they are evolving documents, but nothing in SA appears relevant to that
particular aspect.

Wikipedia uses CC BY-SA because it best reflects their mission of
encouraging open sharing of information. Are there potential dictionary
contributors out there who don't contribute because their work might be
relicensed differently by somebody? No, that is not what is stopping
contributions. Our main problem is any willingness at all amongst
crystallographers to spend time editing dictionaries, which will not change
with the license, in other words, adding SA to CC-BY will make no
difference to the level of contribution.

(Side note: Wikimedia commons accepts CC0, CC-BY and CC-BY-SA (see
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing) with the Wikipedia
project specifically using CC-BY-SA.)


> I agree that patent trolls are a potentially problem. CC 2.0 has a small
> loophole that has caused a lot of problems
> https://thefourthrevolution.org/wordpress/archives/7500?doing_wp_cron=1712207375.7916939258575439453125
> This was patched in CC BY 4.0
>

The incident described there was a bad actor producing CC material and then
pouncing on people who didn't perfectly conform to the license. That would
only have been relevant to us if the IUCr was in the habit of acting like a
patent troll and thus scared people off engaging with our dictionaries.

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