Joint DCC and SCRIPTed Workshop - Legal Environment of Digital Curation

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and SCRIPTed online journal are
delighted to announce that they will be delivering a joint one-day workshop.
This event will take place at the University of Glasgow on November 23, 2007
and will provide a useful overview of legal considerations for non-legal
professionals who work with data. The day will consist of talks by experts
in the areas of:

-Intellectual property rights and licensing
-Data protection, freedom of information and privacy
-Data as evidence

This will be followed in the afternoon by group discussion in each of these
areas.

Intended Audience
The intended audience for this event are people who:

-Share data
-Manage data for others
-Need to preserve data
-Are setting up institutional repositories for data
-Manage collaborations depending on data

Programme
To view the programme for this event, please click here.

Venue
This event will take place in Charles Wilson Building, University of
Glasgow. This is building E15 on the following map.

Registration
You may register here.
Registration fees are £30 for DCC Associates Network members and £60 for
non-members.

Handy hint - membership of the DCC Associates Network is FREE! For more information on
becoming a member, see the Associates Network page.

Nature Precedings – pre-publication research and preliminary findings

You may have heard about Nature Precedings. It’s relevant to us in many ways - from copyright implications, to sharing of findings and ease of access to archiving and preservation.

Nature Precedings is a place for researchers to share documents, including presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and manuscripts. It is a free service which describes itself as providing a rapid way to disseminate emerging results and new theories, solicit opinions, and record the provenance of ideas. It makes such material easy to archive, share and cite.

The site states that you should only submit material to Nature Precedings if you own the copyright (which will usually mean that you wrote it) and have the permission of any other copyright holders (e.g., in the case of a co-authored piece of work, the other authors). They specifically ask that if you are uploading a presentation you take particular care that none of your slides contain material for which you do not own the copyright.

Copyright for all documents remains with the author(s). Others may make use of the material under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Licence. Simply put, this means that the content may be quoted, copied and disseminated for any purpose, but only if the original source is correctly cited.

As well as making scientific documents citable, Nature Precedings also aims to make them globally available and stably archived. To this end, they are in discussions with governmental, academic and not-for-profit organisations about providing mirror sites of Nature Precedings content. The plan is that if, for any reason, this content becomes unavailable from Nature Publishing Group, it will continue to be available through those sites.

Last Call for The Survey of Database Licensing Practices

Primary Research Group is planning to publish a survey of library database licensing practices and is seeking survey participants. The survey will close on October 9th
2007. Academic, public, corporate, legal and special libraries
are eligible. This is an international survey open to libraries
of all countries. Participants receive a free PDF copy of the
estimated 100-page report. Data are broken out by type and size
of institution for easier benchmarking. Click here to take the 40 question
survey.

Thoughts on drafting an open data licence

Further to my previous post on the open data commons database licence I’d like to draw your attention to this post by one of the creators, Jordan Hatcher, where he discusses the thinking behind the development of the licence.

Open data commons database licence

A draft Open Data Commons Database licence has been produced by Jordan Hatcher and Dr. Charlotte Waelde of the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the University of Edinburgh School of Law. It is sponsored by Talis

In Jordan's words it is:

"an attempt at a worldwide licence for databases following in the footsteps of other open /free/libre licences in both software and content. In Creative Commons terms it is an SA licence."

You can read Jordan's blog post announcing its release here.

The draft text of the licence itself is located here.

It is very important to note that this licence covers copyright and database rights over databases. It doesn’t cover the rights over the contents of databases. Because the data has been separated from the database in the licensing,
a supplemental BSD/MIT style licence for the data, intended for
factual information rather than other "contents of a database" has been provided.

There's also a discussion list set up specifically for the licence. Any comments or thoughts would be most welcome.