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

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@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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