Assigning CC-BY-4.0 licence to CIF dictionaries

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Wed, Apr 24, 2024 at 7:12 AM James H via comcifs <comcifs at iucr.org>
wrote:

> I want to analyse Herbert's concerns about CC-BY-SA. Before doing so, what
> I'm proposing is that we determine a default license, but any of
> CC0/CC-BY/CC-BY-SA would be acceptable depending on how the dictionary
> authors want to jump. This is similar to Wikimedia, which allow these
> licenses but individual projects can choose which one they prefer.
>

> The CC licenses have been lawyered very carefully so that they do what
the claim to do in as many jurisdictions as possible. They are used every
day by thousands of organisations and individuals. Our situation (wanting
to publically share documents) is precisely the one envisaged by Creative
Commons. I don't think this is a situation requiring consulting a lawyer.

I would agree.
I am not a lawyer but have been variously involved (including payment)
with IP (licences, copyrights, trademarks, patents, tradesecrets, i related
to software, pharmaceuticals, documents, protocols and take the view that
if something has to be resolved in court it's very expensive,
jurisdiction-dependent and usually unpredictable.

The major (new) issue now is not licenses of individual items but control
of and restriction of access to content, whether "OA" or not . This is
aggravated by the rise of aggregators and megapublishers who act as if
licences do not apply to them, and AI scrapers who scrap and reuse at
random. With a few others I have fought these over the years but gained
little support

Some examples:
* small molecule data effectively belongs to CCDC - nominally part of the
Univ od Cambridge but in practice an autonomous organization. They prohibit
the re-use of more than a trivial subset of "their" content and will
lawlerize "offenders". Effectively they have a near. monology on
small-molecule crystallography.   They have an "agreement" with Elsevier
that crystallographic data is deposited directly into CCDC and never sees
the light of public. Huge kudos to Crystallography Open Database COD for
creating a subset alternative (I am proud to be on the advisory board).
People devloping forcefields from "CCDC data" have been lawyered. It has
effectively meant that "public" data-driven research is controlled by CCDC.
* Springergate. I discovered that Springer copyrighted ALL images in
"their" publications (
https://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/06/06/springergate-springerimages-for-today/)
including my and Wikipedia's CC-BY (SA). They charged 60 USD and added
restrictive licences. When confronted they said it was a "glitch" and
withdrew the images.
* SSRN - a preprint server
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Science_Research_Network which the
SocSci community trusted as Open for many years. It was bought for a huge
sum (rumoured >>100 Million USD) and is now effectively closed and run by
Elsevier
* CLOCKSS, etc. - many expired journals are now only accessible through
preservation services which are incredibl;y tortuous and restrictive -
maybe only access in a clean room and only pen and paper allowed.
https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.24460

One common route into this is a voluntary organization sets something up,
gains res[ect and value, runs into financial trouble, is "helped" by
megapublishers and ends up as a commercial arm of SpringSeverLey.

As a scientific community we generally work by "community norms" and the
bioscience, astronomy, crystallography, have prospered without much
explicit licensing. We should think *at the beginning* about governance. In
the Shuttleworth Foundation we developed a "poison pill" licence which
would deter assimilation.

The biggest effective defence is sunlight. Post CIF spec everywhere.
Version. it critically . Make sure it's got multiple preservation. Add a
tool  (e.g. checksums) to track integrity. Urge that all re-use, especially
by company software can be verified . Make verification software universal
- effectively unittests forintegrity. This can be done on a voluntary basis
- e.g. pledges. We have the tools to monitor this. I would expect almot
universal takeup and no pushback.


P.

-- 
"I always retain copyright in my papers, and nothing in any contract I sign
with any publisher will override that fact. You should do the same".

Peter Murray-Rust
Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics
Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-336432
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.iucr.org/pipermail/comcifs/attachments/20240424/fa5e6792/attachment.htm>