ResourceBlog Article: The complexity of sharing scientific databases

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Wednesday, 23rd July 2008

The complexity of sharing scientific databases

Creative Commons is a clever use of the copyright system intended to make it easier for people who want to, to share their work with others. Jonathan Coulton has used Creative Commons to enable an army of remixers and videomakers to produce promotional materials for his songs and albums. Authors like Dan Gillmor and Cory Doctorow have used Creative Commons to let people download, translate and make audio versions of their books. And Global Voices uses Creative Commons so that blogs and news sites can use our content without asking us for permission.

What about scientists?

That’s the research interest of my colleague Melanie Dulong de Rosnay. She’s using her time as a Berkman fellow to study alternative copyright systems and their usage and relavence within academic and library communities. Yesterday, Melanie presented research on the licensing of scientific databases and the obstacles such licensing presents to collaboration between scientists around the world.

Under US law, pretty much anything you write down is copyrighted. Scrawl an original note on a napkin and it’s protected until 70 years after your death. Facts, however, are another matter - they can’t be copyrighted. So while trivial but creative scribblings are copyrighted, unless you choose to release them into the public domain, the information painstakingly discovered about the human genome - DNA sequences, for instance - aren’t. But the containers they’re stored in - the databases they’re held in - can be copyrighted.

If I sound confused about this stuff, that’s because I am. And so were the folks at Science Commons, the project that spun off from Creative Commons to focus on open publishing of scientific information. For a couple of years, they offered a wonderfully complex FAQ on applying Creative Commons licenses to databases - the first question read “Can a Creative Commons license be applied to a database?” After a six paragraph answer to that question, the third question read, “So, a Creative Commons license can be applied to a database?”

The approach Science Commons is taking now is a different one - they’re now recommending use of a protocol that specifies how data can be made Open Access - the FAQ on that protocol explains that the complexities of asking scientists to release their data under Creative Commons licenses was so severe that Science Commons has ended up advocating for data to be released public domain, under the auspices of their protocol, instead.

Source: My heart's in Accra (Ethan Zuckerman's blog)

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