[Taxacom] Impediments to biodiversity data sharing

[Tony.Rees at csiro.au]

Dear all,

Rod Page wrote:

<snip>
But , leaving that aside, why expressly prevent people building on
your work? To me It speaks either of fear ("people will take 'my' data
and do things with it") or arrogance ("the data is perfect, nobody can
improve upon it"). It also speaks of a greater concern for data
providers ("we invested a lot of effort in gathering this data") than
data users. I would argue this attitude is crippling biodiversity
informatics.
</snip>

Actually the concerns / reluctance of data custodians are a little more complex than this - which does not mean they cannot be addressed, merely that they should at least be recognised as real and strategies be put in place to mitigate perceived fears arising from greater public access to  / re-use of the data. Back in 2004-5 (I think), Rainer Froese of FishBase has encountered many similar issues with some potential data providers and conducted a workshop / survey to look into this in some detail - see description and discussion paper at http://filaman.uni-kiel.de/ifmgeomar/rfroese/ConcernsDataowners.pdf . It would be interesting to see five years on whether the concerns of data custodians have been addressed to any significant degree and resulted in associated freeing up of access to relevant data in the mean time, or if not, what additional steps could or should be done in this area.

Regards - Tony

________________________________________
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Roderic Page [r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk]
Sent: Friday, 31 December 2010 12:33 AM
To: TAXACOM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Completion of 'The Plant List'

Dear Paul,

On 30 Dec 2010, at 12:45, Paul van Rijckevorsel wrote:

> From: "Roderic Page" <r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk>
> Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2010 8:26 PM
>
>> Nice data set, shame about the license. By using a Creative Commons
>> CC
>> BY-NC-ND license, Kew and MOBOT have effectively killed the
>> possibility of anybody building upon this data (see my blog post
>> http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2010/12/plant-list-nice-data-shame-it-not-open.html
>
> ***
> I do not see why this should not be a perfectly respectable choice.
> Of course, it always is nice if everything you want is offered free
> to you,
> whenever you want it, but it is shortsighted to expect this to happen,
> or to ignore the risks.
>

People making data available are, of course, free to choose whatever
license they see fit (although the typical Creative Commons licenses
don't really fit, see http://bibwild.wordpress.com/2008/11/24/creative-commons-is-not-appropriate-for-data
  ). I suspect that if someone dug deep into the sources of the data,
funding, etc., it would be hard to defend a  Creative Commons license
for this list.

But , leaving that aside, why expressly prevent people building on
your work? To me It speaks either of fear ("people will take 'my' data
and do things with it") or arrogance ("the data is perfect, nobody can
improve upon it"). It also speaks of a greater concern for data
providers ("we invested a lot of effort in gathering this data") than
data users. I would argue this attitude is crippling biodiversity
informatics. Compare this with, say, GenBank or Wikipedia, which
people are downloading and doing amazing things with, because they
can. The Plant List has killed the possibility of people doing
interesting things with the data.  I think it's a stunningly short
sighted decision.