BioMed Central Editorial: Help Put the Open in Open Data and Open Bibliography

From a BioMed Central Blog Post:

“Legal restrictions and uncertainties surrounding scientific data are a barrier to efficient data sharing and reuse, and ultimately the pace of research. Copyright in particular is problematic for data. It is often unclear if data are protected by copyright and the law differs greatly internationally.
To try and more universally clarify the legal status of data published in our open access journals – maximizing the potential for secondary data uses such as text mining – we have been working towards a solution: public domain dedication of data under the Creative Commons CC0 waiver.
In a detailed editorial published in BMC Research Notes we set out the case and process for evolving the copyright and licensing structure in open access journals to make published data truly open, according to the Panton Principles. But we need the community’s help putting these principles into practice.
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Practical examples of secondary uses of data in journal articles made possible by CC0 and definitions of data are discussed. Also, new legal wording (license statement) for all published articles is proposed and we believe this model could be adopted by many publishers. However, we want to make this change – which we believe will have numerous benefits for science – with the consensus and support of the scientific community. We therefore now seek public views on the proposals.

Read the Complete Blog Post
Read the Complete Editorial: “Open by default: a proposed copyright license and waiver agreement for open access research and data in peer-reviewed journals”
by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz and Matthew J Cockerill

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Data Files, Journal Articles, News, Open Access