[cellml-discussion] ABI CellML meeting minutes 2009-12-16

[Andrew Miller]

alan.garny at dpag.ox.ac.uk wrote:
> James Lawson wrote:
>> We (Catherine, Poul and I) were thinking that there are basically
>> three places where you'd want to display / store this information
>> within PMR2: in the metadata itself (thereby allowing it to be
>> rendered by software, indexed and searched etc.), on the exposure
>> somewhere (perhaps a rendering of the metadata,) and in the proposed
>> blanket, site-wide 'terms of use' page.
>>
>> As Catherine has mentioned in the relevant tracker item (don't have
>> the number on hand,) one of the issues which we must now decide on is
>> whether to require that all models in the repository abide by CC
>> attrib 3 or whether users can specify special cases.
> 
> We should be open and therefore allow people to go for whatever license
> they want. However, they should be made aware that by doing so, they take
> the risk of their model not being used, etc. This being said, some authors
> might still prefer that outcome to not having their model on the CellML
> repository?

Hi Alan,

Allowing people the ability to choose other licenses is something that I 
think can go into later releases of the repository; however, until then, 
the simplest thing to do is just to require that people need to license 
the model under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

If we do allow other licenses, we do need to make sure that the license 
allows us to distribute the model to everyone who asks for it through 
the model repository - so a manual process of review of any new licenses 
would probably be required (but we could let users choose from several 
licenses we had pre-approved).

I don't think that requiring people to license their contributions under 
a particular license is contrary to the principle of being open - the 
copyright holder of the model can freely license it under the terms and 
submit the model, and this ensures that everyone can download and adapt 
models from the repository - which is more open than it would be if some 
parts of the repository were more restricted.

Best wishes,
Andrew

> 
> Alan
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