[RDA Admin]

Huge thanks to Melissa for her thoughtful explanation, wise advice, and kind encouragement.
My thoughts with respect to the DPLA/ Europeana model of rights statements have been shared on weekly telecons of our IG, but for those reading the list but not listening in to our synchronous discussions, please allow this quick summary:
1. Rights uncertainty/confusion around research data is a major source of friction and churn ( isn’t that what we have been discussing these many months?) There are plenty of potentially valuable data for which rights are not well understood. Even newly created born digital research data is not necessarily eligible for CC0 or other open licenses for many reasons and use cases discussed in our IG
2. Having some kind of simple taxonomy for rights statements will improve the metadata accompanying a dataset
3. Having clear understandable metadata accompanying a dataset to ease reuse will likely become increasingly important for research data sharing: it can even be a component in more formal peer review of datasets (references about this point available on request)
— Gail
Sent from a tablet while on the go.
On Oct 13, 2015, at 6:08 AM, M Levine wrote:
Dear all,
I have kept a general eye on your work from afar and have worked with Gail in the past. I have great respect and enthusiasm for your efforts and am working in my library to think through many of the issues you are tackling. I participated in the working group that produced the DPLA/Europeana rights papers. I want to clarify a few things. We struggled with some of the themes you are raising. First, these are NOT licenses. They are descriptions of the status of rights so that a museum, library, or archives can describe the legal status to the best of their ability. That in turn can be used in the aggregation process. In most cases, ‘LAM’ do not own the copyrights and may be subject to conditions aside from copyright. We needed a way to ‘describe’ rights realizing we needed a framework in addition to Creative Commons licenses. Why? Because most LAM will not have the legal authority to apply a license – but they can describe the rights as best they can. We did our best to model the conceptual framework of Creative Commons licenses as well as the descriptions we’ve used in HathiTrust and the Copyright Review Management System (a project to explore copyright determination and identify books in the public domain in HathiTrust supported by the IMLS).
This is typically going to be relevant for legacy material. It is necessarily complex because we are dealing with an existing framework. For new material, we can address rights cleanly up front and with CC licenses.
In the scientific data arena, you/we have the opportunity to do so much better. You can keep things cleaner and simpler from the start; you seem well on your way to that kind of framework. You might note as a contrast the inherited complexity of the DPLA/Europeana work (I hope in a complimentary – and complementary – way) to make the point that science requires complete rigour and clarity to be reliable and authentic. The point made about the scale of government funding in scientific research underscores the importance of that research for civil society – the data it generates should be as open as possible, as fluidly as possible. Your principles are right on track.
With warm regards,
Melissa Levine
On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 2:38 AM, punkish
wrote:
CNE, NKC, NoC-OKLR, NoC-CR, OOC-NC, InC-NC, InC-EDU, InC-RUU, InC-OW-EU, InC… PhEW !
Hi Willi, others,
I attended the first workshop (at the launch of DPLA in Boston) which also launched the work that has resulted in this document. I really admire DPLA for their principled stance on how our digital cultural heritage should be free from encumbrances. And, perhaps the subtleties of law, ownership and rights are really very nuanced when it comes to cultural works. But please, please, we don’t need 50 shades of rights when it comes to scientific/research works. When people ask me why I use CC0 and why I recommend it, I say that I simply choose to opt out of this nonsense. I want to focus on science. I don’t want a decision tree trying to decide what I can or cannot do with the data I have acquired, or making others go into similar mental contortions when thinking of reusing my data.
Certainly we should refer to this work, but if anything, then as an example of how confusing things can become if we let our minds get away with it.
Please, please let’s strive for simplicity. I say this as a scientist, as a data analyst, and as an advocate of open science. We do not want our scientists and researchers spending time thinking about this any more than absolutely necessary.
—
Full post:
https://rd-alliance.org/group/rdacodata-legal-interoperability-ig/post/r…
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Stop emails for this post:
https://rd-alliance.org/mailinglist/unsubscribe/50209
—
_________________________________________________
Melissa Levine
Lead Copyright Officer
UM Copyright Office, University of Michigan Library
734-615-3194
—
Full post: https://rd-alliance.org/group/rdacodata-legal-interoperability-ig/post/r…
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Stop emails for this post: https://rd-alliance.org/mailinglist/unsubscribe/50209

Discussion

[Donat Agosti]

Though there is jungle of licenses and copyright statements, be it properly applied or not, for existing datasets, the future of this group ought to be the future, not looking back to old data sets. We can learn from them (the past), but we really neet to come up with a system that guides us into the future, ti be applied to data sets that will be created. If we double our knowledge every so many years, especially with big data, we even might want to be relaxed about old datasets for which we do not really understand the applied legal licensing.
Donat
From: Gclement=***@***.***-groups.org [mailto:***@***.***-groups.org] On Behalf Of Repositorian
Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2015 4:12 PM
To: M Levine ; RDA/CODATA Legal Interoperability IG
Cc: punkish
; Willi Egloff
Subject: [rda-legalinterop-ig] Re: [CLS Junk released by Allow List] Re: [rda-legalinterop-ig] Re: [rda-legalinterop-ig] Final whitepapers for establishing…
Huge thanks to Melissa for her thoughtful explanation, wise advice, and kind encouragement.
My thoughts with respect to the DPLA/ Europeana model of rights statements have been shared on weekly telecons of our IG, but for those reading the list but not listening in to our synchronous discussions, please allow this quick summary:
1. Rights uncertainty/confusion around research data is a major source of friction and churn ( isn’t that what we have been discussing these many months?) There are plenty of potentially valuable data for which rights are not well understood. Even newly created born digital research data is not necessarily eligible for CC0 or other open licenses for many reasons and use cases discussed in our IG
2. Having some kind of simple taxonomy for rights statements will improve the metadata accompanying a dataset
3. Having clear understandable metadata accompanying a dataset to ease reuse will likely become increasingly important for research data sharing: it can even be a component in more formal peer review of datasets (references about this point available on request)
— Gail
Sent from a tablet while on the go.
On Oct 13, 2015, at 6:08 AM, M Levine wrote:
Dear all,
I have kept a general eye on your work from afar and have worked with Gail in the past. I have great respect and enthusiasm for your efforts and am working in my library to think through many of the issues you are tackling. I participated in the working group that produced the DPLA/Europeana rights papers. I want to clarify a few things. We struggled with some of the themes you are raising. First, these are NOT licenses. They are descriptions of the status of rights so that a museum, library, or archives can describe the legal status to the best of their ability. That in turn can be used in the aggregation process. In most cases, ‘LAM’ do not own the copyrights and may be subject to conditions aside from copyright. We needed a way to ‘describe’ rights realizing we needed a framework in addition to Creative Commons licenses. Why? Because most LAM will not have the legal authority to apply a license – but they can describe the rights as best they can. We did our best to model the conceptual framework of Creative Commons licenses as well as the descriptions we’ve used in HathiTrust and the Copyright Review Management System (a project to explore copyright determination and identify books in the public domain in HathiTrust supported by the IMLS).
This is typically going to be relevant for legacy material. It is necessarily complex because we are dealing with an existing framework. For new material, we can address rights cleanly up front and with CC licenses.
In the scientific data arena, you/we have the opportunity to do so much better. You can keep things cleaner and simpler from the start; you seem well on your way to that kind of framework. You might note as a contrast the inherited complexity of the DPLA/Europeana work (I hope in a complimentary – and complementary – way) to make the point that science requires complete rigour and clarity to be reliable and authentic. The point made about the scale of government funding in scientific research underscores the importance of that research for civil society – the data it generates should be as open as possible, as fluidly as possible. Your principles are right on track.
With warm regards,
Melissa Levine
On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 2:38 AM, punkish
wrote:
CNE, NKC, NoC-OKLR, NoC-CR, OOC-NC, InC-NC, InC-EDU, InC-RUU, InC-OW-EU, InC… PhEW !
Hi Willi, others,
I attended the first workshop (at the launch of DPLA in Boston) which also launched the work that has resulted in this document. I really admire DPLA for their principled stance on how our digital cultural heritage should be free from encumbrances. And, perhaps the subtleties of law, ownership and rights are really very nuanced when it comes to cultural works. But please, please, we don’t need 50 shades of rights when it comes to scientific/research works. When people ask me why I use CC0 and why I recommend it, I say that I simply choose to opt out of this nonsense. I want to focus on science. I don’t want a decision tree trying to decide what I can or cannot do with the data I have acquired, or making others go into similar mental contortions when thinking of reusing my data.
Certainly we should refer to this work, but if anything, then as an example of how confusing things can become if we let our minds get away with it.
Please, please let’s strive for simplicity. I say this as a scientist, as a data analyst, and as an advocate of open science. We do not want our scientists and researchers spending time thinking about this any more than absolutely necessary.
—
Full post:
https://rd-alliance.org/group/rdacodata-legal-interoperability-ig/post/r…
Manage my subscriptions: https://rd-alliance.org/mailinglist
Stop emails for this post:
https://rd-alliance.org/mailinglist/unsubscribe/50209
—
_________________________________________________
Melissa Levine
Lead Copyright Officer
UM Copyright Office, University of Michigan Library
734-615-3194
—
Full post: https://rd-alliance.org/group/rdacodata-legal-interoperability-ig/post/r…
Manage my subscriptions: https://rd-alliance.org/mailinglist
Stop emails for this post: https://rd-alliance.org/mailinglist/unsubscribe/50209

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