University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

GBIF is asking for views on how it should license of data in the GBIF
network. The full consultation document is available from [Google
Drive](https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-PC5KKdhYCQZ1Y5Q2RySmdPbjQ/edit?usp=sharing)
and
[DropBox](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/639486/GBIF_Consultation_Standard_Data_Licences.pdf).
GBIF is:  

>   
> \...seeking input from all GBIF Participants and stakeholders on the
> following questions:  
>
> Do you have any comments on the plan to associate all GBIF-mediated
> data with a machine readable licence?
>
> Do you have an opinion on the relative merits of Creative Commons,
> Open Data Commons or other licence types in the context of the GBIF
> network?
>
> Which of the two options described in section 8 of this document
> should GBIF pursue? If you support "Option 2", would your position be
> modified if it resulted in a significant decrease in data published to
> the GBIF network?

  
  
The two options referred to above are:  
  
Option 1 -- Support restrictions on commercial use  
  
Option 2 -- Only support fully free-and-open data  
  
If you have opinions on licensing biodiversity data, please read the
consultation document and send your thoughts send to
<licensing@gbif.org> by **5 September 2013**.


GBIF is asking for views on how it should license of data in the GBIF network. The full consultation document is available from Google Drive and DropBox.

GBIF and open biodiversity data: what license should GBIF use?

University of Oxford

David M. Shotton

*David writes: Dr Heinrich Hartman is a new colleague of mine, who,
having been working in the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University,
has just returned to Germany to start a new job in a leading semantic
web research group, that of Steffan Staab at the Institute for Web
Science and Technologies, University of Koblenz-Landau.  What follows
are our thoughts about research openness, that relates to our decision,
described in the [next blog
post](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/478), to merge our
bibliographic citation projects.*

[The following text is jointly authored by David Shotton
(<david.shotton@zoo.ox.ac.uk>) and Heinrich Hartmann
(<hartmann@uni-koblenz.de>)]{.small}

Transparency is essential for trust and credibility in the research
community, and true openness brings great opportunities for academia.
The internet facilitates the free flow of information and knowledge, and
permits new forms of communication both for researchers and for the
general public. Already, today's children can listen freely on the
internet to university courses taught by world-leading scientists, and
everybody has the best encyclopaedia ever written
([Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia)) at their
fingertips.  These are real game changers. Opening up the research
literature is the next logical step.

***Open publishing***

We believe that the current academic publishing model -- whereby
researchers give their content to commercial publishers and then buy it
back from them at enormous cost by means of journal subscription fees --
has become absurd, since it is no longer helping the researcher to
distribute his or her findings, but rather prevents the work from being
widely read, by hiding it behind subscription pay walls.  Would it not
be much better to let this information flow freely, accessible to
everybody who wants to read it!

Of course, such a vision of openness for academic publishing raises
issues of finance and quality control -- who will pay for open access
publishing, and how can we ensure that scientific rigor accompanies open
publication.  While the internet enables dissemination of information at
a fraction of the cost of traditional print publication, publishing
clearly involves more than electronic dissemination.  It is for this
reason that we, with others, are presently planning a high level
conference on modern scientific communication, entitled ***Rigor and
Openness in 21st Century Science***, to be held in Oxford next spring.

However, new publication funding models *are* being developed,
particularly in the United Kingdom, where [Research Councils
UK](http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/) and the [Wellcome
Trust](http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/) are insisting that papers reporting
research results obtained as a result of their research funding should
be published under an open Creative Commons CC-By attribution licence
when an article processing charge (APC) is levied, so that the works are
freely available for text mining and re-use \[1\].  What is significant
is that they are backing their words with funding to enable it.  Cameron
Neylon has recently written a commentary in *Nature* about the
importance of this \[2\].

Furthermore, peer review is being carefully examined by several
forward-looking publishers to determine how well open alternatives to
the present system of confidential review actually work.

***The role of social media in science***

Much academic research is done in relative isolation, because topics
have become so specialized that there may be only a few experts in the
whole world who really understand each particular research problem.
 These experts may be located on different continents, and may not know
about one another -- a situation that is particularly true for Ph.D.
students and other young researchers, who may not yet be familiar with
the literature in their field, and who may have formed few personal
relationships with colleagues in other institutions through attendance
at research conferences.  New forms of academic social media can play a
role here, to catalyse interactions between geographically separated
academics, and many experiments in this area are being conducted.

Academic social media can also play an important role in filtering the
wealth of new articles published every day, and in alerting people to
the small fraction of these that are most relevant to them.  Typically,
junior researchers rely on recommendations from friends and colleagues
about which articles are worth reading, but if academic social media can
be used to broaden this recommendation network, they will provide a
significant service.

***Fears and benefits of openness***

Of course researchers, particularly early in their careers, are cautious
about sharing their discoveries too early or too widely, for fear they
may get 'scooped', since they naturally and quite properly wish to
obtain credit for their own work by being the first to publish it. 
However, what is often missed by people of this mind-set is that working
openly with other people can have benefits too.  It can be a lot more
fun, can lead to more sustainable motivation, can result in incredibly
rapid collaborative progress, and hence can often lead to better
results.  An essential pre-requisite for this is the willingness to
share one's ideas and making contact with like-mined people.  An example
of a researcher who practices openness in his day-to-day research is
[Georgio Gilestro](http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/people/g.gilestro),
Lecturer in Systems Neurobiology with the Department of Life Sciences at
Imperial College London, who publishes his research group's [Open Lab
Book](http://labbook.gilest.ro/about/) online.

Our personal experience, not at least in the joint Open Citations and
Related Work developments described in the [next blog
post](http://opencitations.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/open-citations-and-related-work/),
is that you gain more than you loose by being open!

***Reference***

\[1\]       Wellcome Trust announcement: Open access: CC-BY licence
required for all articles which incur an open access publication fee --
FAQ. Available from
<http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@policy_communications/documents/web_document/WTVM055715.pdf>.

\[2\]       Cameron Neylon (2012). Science publishing: Open access must
enable open use.  *Nature* **492**: 348--349. 
[doi:10.1038/492348a](http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/492348a).


<em>
 David writes: Dr Heinrich Hartman is a new colleague of mine, who, having been working in the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University, has just returned to Germany to start a new job in a leading semantic web research group, that of Steffan Staab at the Institute for Web Science and Technologies, University of Koblenz-Landau.
</em>

Why openness benefits research

I was honoured to talk at the symposium to celebrate Peter Murray-Rusts’ work. I didn’t want to give the usual kind of talk to this audience. I wanted to focus on what I think are the big risks and opportunities for the research community and why I believe that a focus on maximising research impact might be a way to bring the community together in a positive way.

Cameron Neylon

::: {.zemanta-img}
<div>

[![No Television](http://cameronneylon.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/300px-No_Television.svg_4.png "No Television"){decoding="async"}](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:No_Television.svg)
:   Image via
    [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:No_Television.svg)

</div>
:::

I was greatly honoured to be asked to speak at the symposium held on
Monday to recognize Peter Murray-Rusts' contribution to scholarly
communication. The lineup was spectactular, the talks insightful and
probing, and the discussion serious, but also no longer trapped in the
naive yes/no discussions ofÂ opennessÂ and machine readability, but
moving on into detail, edge cases, problems and issues.

For my own talk I wanted to do something different to what I've been
doing in recent talks. Following the example of [Deepak
Singh](http://mndoci.com), [John
Wilbank](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilbanks) and others I've
developed what seems to be a pretty effective way of doing an advocacy
talk, involving lots of slides, big images, few words going by at a fast
rate. Recently I did [118
slides](http://www.slideshare.net/CameronNeylon/the-gatekeeper-is-dead-long-live-the-gatekeeper)
in [20
minutes](http://river-valley.tv/media/conferences/stm-innovation-2010/).
The talk for Peter's symposium required something different so I
eschewed slides and just spoke for 40 minutes wanting to explore the
issues deeply rather than skate over the surface in the way the rapid
fire approach tends to do.

The talk was, I think, reasonably well received and provoked some
interesting (and heated) discussion. I've put the [draft
text](http://piratepad.net/4vTLuh08Ja) I was working from up on an
Etherpad. However due to my own stupidity the talk was neither
livestreamed nor recorded. In a discussion leading up to talk I was
asked whether I wanted to put up a pretty picture as a backdrop and I
thought it would be good to put up the [licensing
slide](http://www.slideshare.net/CameronNeylon/permissions/2) that I use
in all of my talks to show that livestreaming, twittering, etc, is fine
and encouraging people to do it. The trouble is that I navigated to the
[slideshare deck](http://www.slideshare.net/CameronNeylon/permissions)
that has that slide and just hit full screen without thinking. What the
audience therefore saw was the [first
slide](http://www.slideshare.net/CameronNeylon/permissions/1), which
looks like this.

[![A restrictive talk licence prohibiting live streaming, tweeting,
etc.](http://cameronneylon.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/3668119867_3780e20f87_z2.jpgzz1 "Restrictive talk licence"){.alignleft
decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="576"
height="432"}](http://www.flickr.com/photos/24801682@N08/3668119867)

I simply didn't notice as I was looking the other way. The response to
this was both instructive and interesting. The first thing that happened
as soon as the people running the (amazingly effective given the
resources they had) livestream and recording saw the slide they shut
down everything. In a sense this is really positive, it shows that
people respect the requests of the speaker by default.

Across the audience people didn't tweet, and indeed in a couple of cases
[deleted](http://twitter.com/axiomsofchoice/statuses/27019416801644545)
[photographs](http://twitter.com/simonhodson99/statuses/27022432896286721)
that they had taken. Again the respect for the request people thought I
was making was solid. Even in an audience full of radicals and open
geeks no-one questioned the request. I'm slightly gobsmacked in fact
that no-one shouted at me to ask what the hell I thought I was doing.
Some thought I was being ironic, which I have to say would have been too
clever by half. But again it shows, if you ask, people do for the most
part respect that request.

Given the talk was about research impact, and how open approaches will
enable it, it is rather ironic that by inadvertantly using the wrong
slide I probably significantly reduced the impact of the talk. There is
no video that I can upload, no opportunity for others to see the talk.
Several people who I know were watching online whose opinion I value
didn't get to see the talk, and the tweetstream that I might have hoped
would be full of discussion, disagreement, and alternative perspectives
was basically dead. I effectivelyÂ [made my own
point](http://twitter.com/CameronNeylon/statuses/27021791603986432),
reducing what I'd hoped might kick off a wider discussion to a dead talk
that only exists in a static document and memories of the limited number
of people who were in the room.

The message is pretty clear. If you want to reduce the effectiveness and
impact of the work you're doing, if you want to limit the people you can
reach, then use restrictive terms. If you want our work to reach people
and to maximise the chance it has to make a difference, make it clear
and easy for people to understand that they are encouraged to copy,
share, and cite your work. Be open. Make a difference.

::: {.zemanta-pixie}
[![Enhanced by
Zemanta](http://img.zemanta.com/zemified_e.png?x-id=d7c09b9a-7d24-4d73-8248-02c8de11728d){.zemanta-pixie-img
decoding="async"}](http://www.zemanta.com/ "Enhanced by Zemanta"){.zemanta-pixie-a}[]{.zem-script
.more-related .pretty-attribution .paragraph-reblog}
:::


Image via Wikipedia  I was greatly honoured to be asked to speak at the symposium held on Monday to recognize Peter Murray-Rusts’ contribution to scholarly communication. The lineup was spectactular, the talks insightful and probing, and the discussion serious, but also no longer trapped in the naive yes/no discussions ofÂ opennessÂ and machine readability, but moving on into detail, edge cases, problems and issues.

Hoist by my own petard: How to reduce your impact with restrictive licences

![nd.large.png](http://lh6.ggpht.com/_Gct8lVAxKqQ/TRt_2SQxrwI/AAAAAAAAA0s/bQHZhz44vB4/nd.large.png?imgmax=800){border="0"
width="200" height="200" align="right"}The Plant List
(<http://www.theplantlist.org/>) has been released today, complete with
[glowing press
releases](http://www.mobot.org/events/Assets/10195ThePlantList.pdf). The
list includes some 1,040,426 names. I eagerly looked for the
**Download** button, but none is to be found. You can grab download
individual search results (say, at family level), but not the whole data
set.  
  
OK, so that makes getting the complete data set a little tedious (there
are 620 plant families in the data set), but we can still do it without
too much hassle (in fact, I\'ve grabbed the complete data set while
writing this blog post). Then I see that the data is licensed under a
[Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/)
(CC BY-NC-ND) license. Creative Commons is good, right? In this case,
not so much. The CC BY-NC-ND license includes the clause:  

> You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

So, you can look but not touch. You can\'t take this data (properly
attributed, or course) and build your own list, for example with
references linked to DOIs, or to the [Biodiversity Heritage
Library](http://biodiversitylibrary.org) (which is, of course, exactly
what I plan to do). That\'s a derivative work, and the creators of the
Plant List don\'t want you to do that. Despite this, the Plant List want
us to use the data:  

> Use of the content (such as the classification, synonymised species
> checklist, and scientific names) for publications and databases by
> individuals and organizations for not-for-profit usage is encouraged,
> on condition that full and precise credit is given to The Plant List
> and the conditions of the Creative Commons Licence are observed.

Great, but you\'ve pretty much killed that by using BY-NC-ND. Then
there\'s this:  

> If you wish to use the content on a public portal or webpage you are
> required to contact The Plant List editors at editors@theplantlist.org
> to request written permission and to ensure that credits are properly
> made.

Really? The whole point of Creative Commons is that the permissions are
explicit in the license. So, actually I **don\'t** need your permission
to use the data on a public portal, CC BY-NC-ND gives me permission (but
with the crippling limitation that I can\'t make a derivative work).  
  
So, instead of writing a post congratulating the Royal Botanic Gardens,
Kew and Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT) for releasing this data, I\'m
left spluttering in disbelief that they would hamstring its use through
such a poor choice of license. Kew and MOBOT could have made the Plant
List available as open data using one of the licenses listed on the
[Open Definition](http://www.opendefinition.org/licenses/) web site,
such as putting the data in the public domain (for example, or using a
[Creative Commons CC0
license](http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)). Instead,
they\'ve chosen a restrictive license which makes the data closed,
effectively killing the possibility for people to build upon the effort
they\'ve put into creating the list. Why do biodiversity data providers
seem determined to cling to data for dear life, rather than open it up
and let people realise its potential?  
  


The Plant List (http://www.theplantlist.org/) has been released today, complete with glowing press releases. The list includes some 1,040,426 names. I eagerly looked for the
<b>
 Download
</b>
button, but none is to be found.

Postagens de Rogue Scholar

GBIF and open biodiversity data: what license should GBIF use?

Why openness benefits research

Hoist by my own petard: How to reduce your impact with restrictive licences

The Plant List: nice data, shame it's not open