Deepak Singh: Educating people about data ownership

Deepak Singh: Educating people about data ownership

I never got to watch the Bubble 2.0 video (I only heard it on net@nite). Before I could get to see it, it got taken down. Wired talks about the reasons behind the takedown. As a content producer who shares content online and as a scientist who has published papers and a not-so-casual observer of the entire content ownership debate, I am often torn by examples like this one.
What is important for the author? Is it monetary compensation? If content, scientific, media or otherwise is your primary source of income, you can understand why people get a little antsy when someone uses the content without permission. I know too many people, journalists, musicians, etc for whom their creativity is the sole source of income and they are all well meaning, even if they don’t always understand the environment that they operate in.
However, a lot of these issues date back to a world free of Creative Commons, which I believe is celebrating a 5th birthday this weekend. In today’s climate we have choice, so to some extent content owners need to make that choice and then live with their consequences. You can choose to publish your papers in a PLoS journal under a CC license, or you can choose to publish in a closed journal. Obviously, I belong to the open science camp, but I also believe that people have the choice of making decisions. They then must also live with the consequences of those decisions.
What we need is education. When Larry Lessig spoke at the University of Washington recently (I have the full recording if anyone is interested), I asked him a question on this very issue. How many people who upload pictures to flickr really understand the licensing options available to them? How many people understand the pros/cons and implications? Most scientists I know don’t even know what Creative Commons is, Science Commons even less so. On the flip side, do the majority of people wanting to use pictures, etc understand what they can do with media, the proper ways of attribution, etc? I doubt it. Even I am not always sure.
We have a plethora of resources available to us for sharing data, media and information. Scientists have the PLoS and BMC journals. You have resources to share data, documents, pictures, videos, screencasts, etc etc. It is up to us to decide where we put our information and how it is managed. It is also important for everyone to understand and respect those choices. The dialog on what is the best approach to sharing data and the advantages of open data can be discussed as we go along.

PMR: We have to liberate scientific images unless there is a good reason why not. There will continue to be problematic areas when re-use is mis-use. For example CC-BY would allow derivative works including – say – altering the gray scale or the pixels in an image. (I hope no-one would edit in an incorrect scale bar!) And it’s important to keep the caption with the image – until we get better metadata packaging. But, in general all scientific images should be stamped CC-BY or SC. Scientific images are different from people’s photographs. They are part of the scientific record. And they should NOT belong to the publisher.