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Hi all,

This is an interesting point - thanks for bringing it to the community,
Catherine!

Though I am not a developer of CellML models, but rather a user of them (in
the bioinformatics, data integration sense), I have a few points to make
that might help this discussion. I have spent a lot of time thinking about
licensing with respect to ontologies, which are similar beasts in terms of
licensing, IMHO.

Firstly: the distinction between *attribution* and *citation*. At the risk
of tooting my own horn, me and a colleague Frank Gibson have written about
this in the context of the life sciences here:
http://themindwobbles.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/attribution-vs-citation-do-you-know-the-difference/.
Basically, what I would like people to get from this point is that you
need to carefully define what the goal is that you want to achieve with the
terms of model distribution.

Secondly: licensing (which guarantees attribution, but not necessarily
citation). The most common requirement mentioned in the links below is
attribution. Some have suggested GPL, others the CC-BY license. I would like
to suggest that you do NOT use GPL. Although the name "viral" may be
misleading, it is true that if a 3rd party wants to use your GPL-licensed
models, that if you create a software program that *is a derived work of
another software program, then that combined work must be distributed under
these terms*. This means that you are restricting everyone down the line to
using GPL. I would suggest a variant of the Creative Commons license, such
as CC-BY. However, Creative Commons is explictly NOT designed for software.
Here, you run into the same problem I had with figuring out a license for
ontologies: are ontologies - and models - software or documents? It is my
impression (and one that seems to be backed up by the Science Commons folks)
that these are indeed documents, and would be suitable for CC. CC allows you
to choose a license that isn't defined by any particular country. CC-BY
forces attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) while
CC-BY-SA (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) enforces
attribution and for people to use similar, compatible (but not identical)
licensing. (btw, it seems the BioModels terms of use are here, and might be
worth a read: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/biomodels-main/termsofuse)

Thirdly: attribution stacking. While it is a good idea (it's what I do) to
require attribution in your license, because CellML models may be
incorporated one into another into another into another etc, you may get the
situation very quickly where it becomes rather unwieldy to ensure everything
has been attributed properly. Conversely, if each model gets the attribution
right each time, it may not be such a high wall to climb after all. The
Science Commons people have something to say about this in general:
http://themindwobbles.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/science-commons-provide-a-list-of-considerations-for-researchers-looking-to-license-their-ontology/.
The link I provide here is about ontologies, but the broad points
remain
important.

Finally, do you want links to the other model URIs, or to the DOIs of the
papers they're described in? I'm guessing the former, as perhaps the latter
will be included in the model's metadata anyway? However, model authors may
be more keen, in terms of # of citations being an important metric, to see a
DOI put in instead. Not sure, would have to ask the modellers themselves.

Hope this helps, and sorry for the length - I didn't intend it to be so long
when I started!

:) allyson

2009/12/1 Catherine Lloyd <c.lloyd at auckland.ac.nz>

> Dear All
>
> We are looking towards using the MIRIAM Standard for the basic set of
> CellML model curation flags. In order to do this we need to consider how we
> are going to address the following point:
>
> "Is the model linked to a precise statement about the terms of
> distribution?"
>
> This issue has been raised at an Auckland CellML team meeting:
>
> http://www.cellml.org/community/meeting/minutes/2009/11.25
>
> And it has also been discussed (briefly) on the Physiome tracker:
>
> https://tracker.physiomeproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2056
>
> Before we come up with a definite solution to this problem we would like to
> open up the discussion further and invite the community to add any comments
> they might have to this tracker item.
>
> Thank you in advance for your thoughts and ideas!
>
> Best wishes
> Catherine
>
> _______________________________________________
> cellml-discussion mailing list
> cellml-discussion at cellml.org
> http://www.cellml.org/mailman/listinfo/cellml-discussion
>



--
Allyson Lister
http://themindwobbles.wordpress.com

CISBAN, http://www.cisban.ac.uk
Newcastle University
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• [cellml-discussion] Terms of use for CellML models and associated content hosted on models.cellml.org, Catherine Lloyd, 12/02/2009
  • [cellml-discussion] Terms of use for CellML models and associated content hosted on models.cellml.org, Allyson Lister, 12/02/2009
    • [cellml-discussion] Terms of use for CellML models and associated content hosted on models.cellml.org, Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser, 12/03/2009
      • [cellml-discussion] Terms of use for CellML models and associated content hosted on models.cellml.org, Catherine Lloyd, 12/03/2009

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