Re: Assigning CC-BY-4.0 licence to CIF dictionaries



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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