I had a glance at the plans already in the ACS in Boston ,\nbut this week BioMed Central announced a draft call\nfor Open Data in their journals:
\n\n\n\n\nThe decision to mandate data deposition as a condition of publication is another decision best made by the scientific community\nconcerned rather than a single journal or publisher as, for example, has been established in the microarray and evolutionary\nbiology communities [19]. We will, therefore, support data publication when it is mandated, but will also enable, encourage\nand recognize [20] data sharing and publication on a voluntary basis for scientists wishing to show leadership in their field.
\n
Now, as the journal already allows reuse of papers (CC-BY license), this also applies to\ndata (and in at least several countries data cannot be copyrighted at all, but we need a world-wide solution; it’s the 21st century).\nHowever, earlier this year the Panton Principles were\nintroduced which formalize the idea behind public domain waiving, and suggest the CC0 waiver\nas one valid approach. This is where BioMed Central wants to go too; they write:
\n\n\n\n\nAll research articles published in BioMed Central journals are published under the Creative Commons attribution licence [22] (CC-BY),\nwith which authors retain the copyright to their work. This licence allows unrestricted distribution and re-use provided that the\noriginal article is cited. We support the Panton Principles for open data in science [23] and open data should therefore mean that\nit is freely available on the public internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyse, re-process, pass them to software or\nuse them for any other purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to\nthe internet itself. We encourage the use of fully open file formats wherever possible.
\n\n…
\n\nTherefore, to eliminate potential legal impediments to integration and re-use of data, specifically, and to help enable long-term\ninteroperability of data we believe an appropriate licence or waiver specific to data should be applied, and made explicit by the\nauthors and publishers. There are a number of conformant licences [25] for open data, of which Creative Commons CC0 [26] is widely\nrecognised. Under CC0, authors waive all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law and all related or\nneighboring legal rights he or she had in the work, to the extent allowable by law.
\n
The above quoted text are extracted from the draft, and your comments are most welcome. You can leave them\nas comment here, which I strongly\nencourage you to do. If even just to support the idea (see McPrinciple3).
\n\nThe draft also touches the issue of Open Standards, but I feel this problem with resolve itself. More interestingly, it is now time\nfor the journal editors to make a move, and let the community know if they will require these open data waivers for there journal.\nFor example, cheminformatics as field would benefit very much if the Journal of Cheminformatics\nwould make this move. But at the same time, I fully understand that a young journal may not yet be in the position to do just that yet.
", "summary": "I had a glance at the plans already in the ACS in Boston , but this week BioMed Central announced a draft call for Open Data in their journals:", "date_published": "2010-09-04T00:00:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2026-09-27T00:00:00+00:00", "tags": ["opendata","bmc","publishing"], "authors": [ { "name": "Egon Willighagen", "url": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7542-0286" } ] } ] }