Open by default: Applying the right license to research data in

open access journalsCOASP, Budapest, 20 September 2012

Iain HrynaszkiewiczPublisher (Open Science), BioMed Centraliain.hrynaszkiewicz@biomedcentral.com

BioMed Central open data initiatives

1. Data journals and article types2. Open Data Award3. Data deposition (repositories), citation, and linking4. Data/workflow integration (LabArchives partnership)5. Data licensing6. Human subjects – confidentiality and consent7. Guidance and best practice8. Data formats and standards

Sources of data in OA journals

• Additional files (supplementary material) which include data sets supporting reported results

• Bibliographic data including reference lists• Numerical tables in main text of articles• Data points underlying graphs • Text-minable terms and other machine-harvestable

information

Sources of data in OA journals

• Additional files (supplementary material) which include data sets supporting reported results

• Bibliographic data including reference lists• Numerical tables in main text of articles• Data points underlying graphs• Text-minable terms and other machine-harvestable

information• In other words, we’re all data publishers

The Guardian, 23 May 2012:“Bergman, Murray-Rust, Piwowar and countless other academics are prevented from using the most modern research techniques because the big publishing companies such as Macmillan, Wiley and Elsevier, which control the distribution of most of the world's academic literature, by default do not allow text mining of the content that sits behind their expensive paywalls.”http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/may/23/text-mining-research-tool-forbidden

JISC text mining report, March 2012“Legal uncertainty, inaccessible information silos, lack of information andlack of a critical mass are barriers to text mining within UKFHE.”http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/reports/2012/value-text-mining.pdf

Hargreaves report, May 2011“According to the Wellcome Trust, 87 per cent of the material housed in UK’s main medical research database (UK PubMed Central) is unavailable for legal text and data mining.”http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview-finalreport.pdf

Why does open data licensing matter?

• Open data is a means to do better science more efficiently

• Licenses, copyright and IP are legal barriers to data sharing and reuse

• Removal maximises potential for data reuse, integration and discovery of new knowledge

“BioMed Central believes that the concept of open data, analogous to its policy on open access to journals, goes beyond making data freely accessible. Data should also be free to distribute, copy, re-format, and integrate into new research, without legal impediments”

BioMed Central’s draft position statement on open data. September 2010http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs/bmcblog/resource/opendatastatementdraft.pdf

“The data should be released in standardized formats without intellectual property constraints.” Conway PH, VanLare JM: Improving Access to Health Care Data: The Open Government Strategy. JAMA 2010;304(9):1007-1008.

http://pantonprinciples.org/

http://www.isitopendata.org/

“[P]eople mis-use copyright licenses on uncopyrightable materials and data sets: the confusion of the legal right of attribution in copyright with the academic and professional norm of citation of one's efforts.” John Wilbanks, VP, Science, Creative Commons, http://bit.ly/djl5Fa August 11, 2010

“...any restrictions on use should be strongly resisted and we endorse explicit encouragement of open sharing.” Schofield et al.: Post-publication sharing of data and tools. Nature 2009, 461:171.

Copyright and data

If data = numerical representation of facts then they are generally not copyrightable, but...

• Many levels of data/derived digital data• Jurisdictional differences (e.g. US vs.

Australian law; EU database rights)= ambiguity about legal status of content

Licenses and waivers for data

• Licenses are for asserting rights; waivers are for giving them up

• Several licenses/waivers are compliant with Open Knowledge definitions http://opendefinition.org/licenses/

• “Attribution stacking” inherent in CC-BY problematic for large/combined datasetsBall A: How to License Research Data 2011

http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/license-research-data

Why Creative Commons CC0?

• interoperability: CC0 is human and machine-readable

• universality: CC0 is global and universal and widely recognized

• simplicity: no need for humans to make, and respond to, individual data requestsSchaeffer P: Why does Dryad use CC0? http://blog.datadryad.org/2011/10/05/why-does-dryad-use-cc0/

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

CC0 use cases – LabArchives ELN

• BioMed Central authors entitled to LabArchives’ electronic lab notebook with 100Mb of free storage (http://www.labarchives.com/bmc)

• Features include:- Data publishing with DOIs assignment- Citable, linkable data supporting publications- Reusable/integrate-able data with CC0- Integrated manuscript submission to BMC journals- Additional free storage (standard is 25Mb)http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/supportin

gdata

LabArchives partnership

Implementing CC-BY-CC0 in journals – why?

• Removes ambiguity about legal status of data

• Helps facilitate reuse including text mininge.g. Testing of analysis tools against data harvested from journals

• Open bibliography – diversification and democratization of impact measures

• Faster progress where lack of combinable datasets are hampering research e.g. EvoMRIHrynaszkiewicz I, Cockerill MJ: Open by default: a proposed copyright

license and waiver agreement for open access research and data in peer-reviewed journals. BMC Research Notes 2012, 5:494 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1756-0500/5/494

Implementing CC-BY-CC0 in journals – how?

• Specify a date from which the new license would apply to data (CC-BY remains for other content)

• Some relatively minor technical and operational implications

• Cultural change may be the biggest challenge

• Public consultation with authors, editors, funders and other stakeholders

Hrynaszkiewicz I, Cockerill MJ: Open by default: a proposed copyright license and waiver agreement for open access research and data in peer-reviewed journals. BMC Research Notes 2012, 5:494 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1756-0500/5/494

Proposed new license statement

“© 2012 <Author> et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Data included in this article, its reference list(s) and its additional files, are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/; http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/access).”

But what do we mean by data?

• Definitions vary quite widely• For implementation, general guidelines

with specific examples needed• Examples in journal articles/additional

files include tabular data, XML, CSV, graphical data points, bibliographic data (including reference lists), RDF

Open by default – opt out

• Public domain with no copy/other rights is not always possible, even for open access content

• Non-standard licenses needed, as already happens for e.g. US government employees

• Few changes to standard procedures and author behaviour needed for implementation

• New license only applies to content submitted for publication

Questions, concerns?

• Will I risk loss of credit (citations)? • Will I put competitors at an advantage?• Will plagiarism be more likely?• Will I lose any right to express wishes

about future uses of my data?• ....?

Join the data debate

• How appropriate is public domain dedication for data you (already) publish in journals?

• How do you define data – what data file types do you commonly publish as additional files?

• How might removing legal restrictions on data sharing benefit (or harm) your research?

• And, publishers: how adoptable is this model?

http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2012/09/10/put-the-open-in-open-data

Questions?

Iain HrynaszkiewiczPublisher (Open Science), BioMed Centraliain.hrynaszkiewicz@biomedcentral.com

http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/iain-hrynaszkiewicz/

http://uk.linkedin.com/in/iainhz@iainh_z

Attribution vs. citation

Activity Attribution and/or citation

Printing an article for display at a conference

Attribution

Translating an article for publication in another journal

Attribution + citation

Paraphrasing a concept or finding within an article

Citation

Reusing a figure, table or graph

Attribution + citation

Publication of a reanalysis of data published as an additional

file in a journal

Citation