Cameron Neylon

I spent two days this week visiting [Peter
Murray-Rust](http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust) and others at
the [Unilever Centre for Molecular
Informatics](http://www-ucc.ch.cam.ac.uk/) at
[Cambridge](http://cam.ac.uk). There was a lot of useful discussion and
I learned an awful lot that requires more thinking and will no doubt
result in further posts. In this one I want to relay a conversation we
had over lunch with Peter, [Jim
Downing](http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/downing/), [Nico
Adams](//wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/adams/), Nick Day and [Rufus
Pollock](http://www.rufuspollock.org/) that seemed extremely productive.
It should be noted that what follows is my recollection so may not be
entirely accurate and shouldnâ€™t be taken to accurately represent other
peopleâ€™s views necessarily.

The appropriate way to license published scientific data is an argument
that has now been rolling on for some time. Broadly speaking the
argument has devolved into two camps. Firstly those who have a belief in
the value of share-alike or copyleft provisions of
[GPL](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License) and
similar licenses. Many of these people come from an [Open Source
Software](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_software) or [Open
Content](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_content) background. The
primary concern of this group is spreading the message and use of Open
Content and to prevent â€œfreeloadersâ€? from being able to use Open
material and not contribute back to the open community. A presumption in
this view is that a license is a good, or at least acceptable, way of
achieving both these goals. Also included here are those who think that
it is important to allow people the freedom to address their concerns
through copyleft approaches. I think it is fair to characterize Rufus as
falling into this latter group.

On the other side are those, including myself, who are concerned more
centrally with enabling re-use and re-purposing of data as far as is
possible. Most of us are scientists of one sort or another and not
programmers *per se*. We donâ€™t tend to be concerned about freeloading
(or in some cases welcome it as effective re-use). Another common
characteristic is that we have been prevented from being able to make
our own content as free as we would like due to copyleft provisions. I
prefer to make all my content CC-BY (or cc0 where possible). I am
frequently limited in my ability to do this by the wish to incorporate
CC-BY-SA or GFDL material. We are deeply worried by the potential for
licensing to make it harder to re-use and re-mix disparate sets of data
and content into new digital objects. There is a sense amongst this
group that "data is different" to other types of content, particulary in
its diversity of types and re-uses. More generally there is the concern
that anything that â€œsmells of lawyersâ€?, like something called a
â€œlicenseâ€?, will have scientists running screaming in the opposite
direction as they try to avoid any contact with their local
administration and legal teams.

What I think was productive about the discussion on Tuesday is that we
focused on what we could agree on with the aim of seeing whether it was
possible to find a common position statement on the limited area of best
practice for the publication of data that arises from public science. I
believe such a statement is important because there is a window of
opportunity to influence funder positions. Many funders are adopting
data sharing policies but most refer to â€œfollowing best practiceâ€?
and that best practice is thin on the ground in most areas. With funders
wielding the ultimate potential stick there is great potential to
bootstrap good practice by providing clear guidance and tools to make it
easy for researchers to deliver on their obligations. Funders in turn
will likely adopt this best practice as policy if it is widely accepted
by their research communities.

So we agreed on the following (I think â€" anyone should feel free to
correct me of course!):

1.  A simple statement is required along the forms ofÂ  â€œbest practice
    in data publishing is to apply protocol Xâ€?. Not a broad selection
    of licenses with different effects, not a complex statement about
    what the options are, but â€œbest practice is Xâ€?.
2.  The purpose of publishing public scientific data and collections of
    data, whether in the form of a paper, a patent, data publication, or
    deposition to a database, is to enable re-use and re-purposing of
    that data. Non-commercial terms prevent this in an unpredictable and
    unhelpful way. Share-alike and copyleft provisions have the
    potential to do the same under some circumstances.
3.  The scientific research community is governed by strong community
    norms, particularly with respect to attribution. If we could
    successfully expand these to include share-alike approaches as a
    community expectation that would obviate many concerns that people
    attempt to address via licensing.
4.  Explicit statements of the status of data are required and we need
    effective technical and legal infrastructure to make this easy for
    researchers.

So in aggregate I think we agreed a statement similar to the following:

"*Where a decision has been taken to publish data deriving from public
science research, best practice to enable the re-use and re-purposing of
that data, is to place it explicitly in the public domain via* {one of a
small set of protocols e.g. cc0 or PDDL}."

The advantage of this statement is that it focuses purely on what should
be done once a decision to publish has been made, leaving the issue of
what should be published to a separate policy statement. This also
sidesteps issues of which data should not be made public. It focuses on
data generated by public science, narrowing the field to the space in
which there is a moral obligation to make such data available to the
public that fund it. By describing this as best practice it also allows
deviations that may, for whatever reason, be justified by specific
people in specific circumstances. Ultimately the community, referees,
and funders will be the judge of those justifications. The [BBSRC data
sharing
policy](http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/publications/policy/data_sharing_policy.html)
states for instance:

> BBSRC expects research data generated as a result of BBSRC support to
> be made available...no later than the release through
> publication...*in-line with established best practiceÂ  in the field*
> \[CN -- my emphasis\]...

The key point for me that came out of the discussion is perhaps that we
canâ€™t and wonâ€™t agree on a general solution for data but that we can
articulate best practice in specific domains. I think we have agreed
that for the specific domain of published data from public science there
is a way forward. If this is the case then it is a very useful step
forward.


I spent two days this week visiting Peter Murray-Rust and others at the Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics at Cambridge. There was a lot of useful discussion and I learned an awful lot that requires more thinking and will no doubt result in further posts. In this one I want to relay a conversation we had over lunch with Peter, Jim Downing, Nico Adams, Nick Day and Rufus Pollock that seemed extremely productive.

A breakthrough on data licensing for public science?

[![Southampton, England,
United-Kingdom](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3a/Southampton_-_mur_medieval_02.JPG/202px-Southampton_-_mur_medieval_02.JPG){decoding="async"}](http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Southampton_-_mur_medieval_02.JPG)

Image via
[Wikipedia](http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Southampton_-_mur_medieval_02.JPG)

I'm aware I've been trailing this idea around for sometime now but its
been difficult to pin down due to issues with room bookings. However I'm
just going to go ahead and if we end up meeting in a local bar then so
be it! If
[Southampton](http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=50.89696,-1.40416&spn=1.0,1.0&q=50.89696,-1.40416&t=h "Southampton"){rel="geolocation"}
becomes too difficult I might organise to have it at RAL instead but
Southampton is more convenient in many ways.

[Science Blogging 2008:
London](http://network.nature.com/forum/sciblog2008) will be held on
August 30 at the Royal Institution and as a number of people are coming
to that it seemed a good opportunity to get a few more people together
to have a get together and discuss how we might move things forward.Â 
This now turns out to be one of a series of such workshops following on
from [Collaborating for the future of open
science](http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/06/04/esof-2008-satellite-event-collaborating-for-the-future-of-open-science/),
organised by [Science
Commons](http://sciencecommons.org/ "Science Commons"){rel="homepage"}
as a satellite meeting of EuroScience Open Forum in Barcelona next
month, BioBarCamp/Scifoo from 5-10 August and a possible Open Science
Workshop at
[Stanford](http://www.stanford.edu/ "Stanford University"){rel="homepage"}
on Monday 11 August, as well as the [Open Science
Workshop](http://psb.standford.edu/cfp-opensci.htm) in
[Hawaii](http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=21.3113888889,-157.796388889&spn=10.0,10.0&q=21.3113888889,-157.796388889&t=h "Hawaii"){rel="geolocation"}
(can't let the bioinformaticians have all the good conference sites to
themselves!) at the [Pacific Symposium on
Biocomputing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Symposium_on_Biocomputing "Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing"){rel="wikipedia"}.

For the Southampton meeting I would propose that we essentially look at
having four themed sessions: Tools, Data standards, Policy/Funding, and
Projects. Within this we adopt an unconference style where we decide who
speaks based on who is there and want to present something. My ideas is
essentially to meet on the Sunday evening at a local hostelry to discuss
and organise the specifics of the program for Monday. On the Monday we
spend the day with presentations and leave plenty of room for
discussion. People can leave in the afternoon, or hang around into the
evening for further discussion. We have absolutely zero, zilch, nada
funding available so I will be asking for a contribution (to be
finalised later but probably Â£10-15 each) to cover coffee/tea and lunch
on the Monday.

[![Zemanta
Pixie](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=7c0d2d8c-fc26-4e7e-be75-5baba27f5ea4){decoding="async"}](http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/7c0d2d8c-fc26-4e7e-be75-5baba27f5ea4/ "Zemified by Zemanta")


Image via Wikipedia  I’m aware I’ve been trailing this idea around for sometime now but its been difficult to pin down due to issues with room bookings. However I’m just going to go ahead and if we end up meeting in a local bar then so be it! If Southampton becomes too difficult I might organise to have it at RAL instead but Southampton is more convenient in many ways.

Open Science Workshop at Southampton – 31 August and 1 September 2008

As part of the [BioSysBio
meeting](http://conferences.theiet.org/biosysbio/) being held in London
20-22 of April, [Mattias
Rantalainen](http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Mattias_Rantalainen)
kindly asked me to contribute to a workshop on Open Science being held
on the Wednesday. A number of [OpenWetWare](http://openwetware.org)
people including [Julius
Lucks](http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/User:Julius_B._Lucks) and [John
Cumbers](http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:John_Cumbers) have agreed to
come on board to help. You can see the draft abstract which is [up at
OpenWetWare](http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Cameron_Neylon/BioSysBioabstract).
If you are the meeting do come along either to cheer us along in our
quest to enthuse the next generation of scientists about Open Stuff or
to argue with us about the details of how to do it. I wanted to flag two
things up here. One is that we propose to start thrashing out a
'Protocol for Open Science'; a charter of rights and responsibilities
that we hope we can agree as a community to adopt as a standard, or
perhaps set of standards.

I don't imagine this will be an easy process but the aim is to start to
define the issues with the aim of taking this forward over the next
12-18 months. An initial draft will be put forward at the workshop and
will be made available for community discussion.

More practically Julius has set up an openscience email list based at
OpenWetWare. You can sign up just by adding your OWW username to the
[wiki List page](http://openwetware.org/wiki/List:OpenScience) (you do
have to be a member of OWW but this is just a matter of signing up).
This will be useful for carrying on the conversation not just about
standards but also about the all the issue surrounding being open.

I propose the tag osci-protocol to capture the blog based discussion and
other discussion.


As part of the BioSysBio meeting being held in London 20-22 of April, Mattias Rantalainen kindly asked me to contribute to a workshop on Open Science being held on the Wednesday. A number of OpenWetWare people including Julius Lucks and John Cumbers have agreed to come on board to help. You can see the draft abstract which is up at OpenWetWare.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

A breakthrough on data licensing for public science?

Open Science Workshop at Southampton – 31 August and 1 September 2008

Open Science at BioSysBio – London 20-22 April