I would add to it that I’d like to see a meaningful discussion of the risks of Share Alike and Attribution on data integration. Chemspider’s move to CC-BY-SA fits into this discussion nicely - it’s a total violation of the open data protocol we laid out at SC, which says “Don’t Use CC Licenses on Data” - but it does conform inside the broader OKD.

Now, let’s take this into pieces.

1. John notes that ChemSpider is in compliance with the OKD. This means, that ChemSpider thinks about Open Data just like the Open Knowledge Foundation does. I’ve scanned through the OKD, and it indeed seems to support the BY and SA clauses of the CC. So, Chemspider did not do a bad thing.
2. Data integration is tricky: you have to keep track of license information on an entry-by-entry level. For each fact, you keep to track the source, and associate the source with it’s original license. For example, the NMRShiftDB information in ChemSpider should be GNU FDL.
3. OpenX licenses may be viral. This holds for the GNU GPL as well as for the CC-BY-SA. Nothing new there. It just requires that when you would like to incorporate the ChemSpider data into a larger database, that database has to be CC-BY-SA too, or likely at least CC-SA.

Summarizing, I think ChemSpider did a good thing, and that ChemSpider does not violate the OpenData idea, but instead, that the CC-BY-SA and the OKD violates John’s requirements for integrating data resources (apparently based on a two year legal study). That has nothing to do with ChemSpider.

Now, people will always have different opinions on Openness. The original BSD clause had a restrictive ‘advertisement’ clause, not Open enough for at least the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), while still open source. The clause was later removed from the BSD license.

Another Debian example is Firebox, which is named IceWeasel in Debian, because the ‘license’ on the Firefox name is not open enough.

Another problem with the definition of Openness, is the viral aspect of some licenses (see earlier). For some, the GPL is not open enough, because it does not give people the freedom to license their software they like themselves, something the BSD and MIT licenses do allow. There is ongoing debate (and that should be ongoing) on how much freedom a license must provide to be called Open. The whole OpenAccess discussion is similar (see e.g. Peter’s story on this), where the discussion on the minimal amount of freedom is even worse.

Should we worry about ChemSpider being ‘only’ CC-BY-SA? Maybe. Data is not software, but I disagree that viral license would be OK for software, but NOT for data. That’s just BSD-versus-GPL all over again. I am happy about OpenBabel being GPL, and I am happy about ChemSpider being CC-BY-SA too.

All that said, these discussion are important. And creating good definitions of what freedoms are required, are crucial in deciding whether something is Open. The Blue Obelisk does not have/use such definitions yet, and we should start discussing this, and define a Blue Obelisk ODOSOS Guidelines. Please no funny jokes about how we can boogy then :)

Now, looking forward to hearing what you think about these issues… Looking forward to the other blog items!

His blog mentions the concept of public domain, where data might be dumped, but I always understood that the US public domain concept is different from that of mainland-EU, German law in particular. This second ‘good link’ points to a license which formalizes this ‘public domain’ idea. And reading it, I realize that I have read it before. But I had completely forgot about it.

A quick reread of these two links, tells me that it indeed is BSD-versus-GPL all over again; with the Science Commons license on the BSD side, and CC-BY-SA at the GPL side. The first surely makes the life easier of aggregators who wish to combine licenses. Can’t argue with that.

Then again… what’s wrong with a bit of viral character in the license? What’s wrong with the statement that ‘you may use my data, if I may use your aggregated data with the same license’? That limits your what you practically can do, but does not limit your freedoms.

You may not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work with any technological measures that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License Agreement.

CC-BY 3.0 reads differently, but has similar aims.

Let me make clear that I value machine readable publications much more than free (gratis, as-in-free-beer) publications. Now, the NIH initiative now just is ‘Free Access’. An interesting step, but not one I care much about; not in relation to science anyway.

Now, Peter indicates that the NIH has put in place ‘technological measures to control access’ to the distribution of our work on userscripts (the PMC entry). That is in clear violation of the CC license.

I know that other NIH initiatives do allow this, such as PMC OAI, but that’s just an ‘auxiliary service’. It may come down to technical details, but some text on the PMC website is at least inaccurate:

Crawlers and other automated processes may NOT be used to systematically retrieve batches of articles from the PMC web site. Bulk downloading of articles from the main PMC web site, in any way, is prohibited because of copyright restrictions.

They way it is described right now, it is like: You may not drive a car. Next paragraph. But, if you have a driver license, we will approve. Or, translated to this example: You may only use this and that article, but only a few of them. Next paragraph. Unless you use the following technical hole in the measure we took to disallow you access.

What the PMC website should indicate, instead, is that text mining is allowed for the PMC OAI subset, but that they would highly prefer to use the PMC OAI or PMC FTP routes. This is the least they have to do.

No matter what, I still have the feeling that any technical obstacles are disallowed by the CC-license. Any legal expert here, that can explain me if the CC license allows controlling how people have access to my material?

Interestingly, this is really not problems just regarding commercial publishers, or closed access publishing or so. Yesterday, Christoph and I working on getting the NMR spectrum text mining going in Bioclipse again for the workshop, we noticed that the open access Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry, does not make Open Data reality either: the experimental sections are generally (all?) excluded from the main text in HTML and obscured in .doc files in the supplementary information.

BTW, this makes me wonder if organic chemists still consider the experimental properties of molecules novel science.