Re: Licsensing scientific data
Hi Andreas,
On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 10:04 AM, Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu> wrote:
> For one moment I was thinking that it is a correct thing to
> release scientific data under a license which does not allow changing
> the data because - hey, I do not want even myself change the result of
> my measurements so why should anybody else do so.
Format changing is one reason why being allowed to change data is
important. Fixing data is another, and transcription error are
abundant.
> However there was some interesting argument that some data might be
> in some unusable format and simply needed reformating to be used by
> the usual programs which handle this kind of data.
The format changing is an important one indeed. Making data available
in Resource Description Framework (RDF) formats already requires that.
> So what the license should actually reflect is that we do not want
> anybody to change the real content like changing / adding / removing
> numbers or something like this. There is no need to forbid changes
> which are relevant for say the MD5 sum of the file but just changing the
> spacing.
I am not sure why you should disallow change at all, and would
strongly argue against it. Not being able to mix, change, build on
other work, does not sound very useful to science to me.
Can you please elaborate on your specific example, and why changing
that data would be evil?
Egon
--
Dr E.L. Willighagen
Postdoctoral Researcher
Institutet för miljömedicin
Karolinska Institutet (http://ki.se/imm)
Homepage: http://egonw.github.com/
LinkedIn: http://se.linkedin.com/in/egonw
Blog: http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/
PubList: http://www.citeulike.org/user/egonw/tag/papers
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