[Taxacom] BHL and print on demand publishers

[Roderic Page]

Dear Curtis,

I think you're conflating separate things here. The last thing I'd want to see is  a "no derivatives" license on nomenclatural works. If BHL did this, for example, then I couldn't do things like http://biostor.org, nor could I correct OCR errors or bibliographic metadata errors in BHL (which are many). 

I think what meets your need is versioning, e.g. this is the original scan, here is the original OCR, this is the version with the OCR corrected, this is the version with the image contrast improved, resulting in cleaner OCR, etc. You want to be able to roll back to the original, but also enable people to clean up, fix, or annotate the data.

In my opinion "no derivatives" is the worst form of license, data is only meaningful once it's been cleaned, analysed, combined with other sources, etc. Someone putting "no derivatives" on data needs a good smack (I'm looking at you, Plant List).

As an aside, I also think scanning nomenclatural-only portions would be a mistake, and one BHL hasn't made. There are economies of effort by scanning in bulk irrespective of whether the item scanned is relevant to a particular group. A bit like whole genome sequencing, you go after everything, not the bits some feel will be relevant.

Lastly, Creative Commons rests on copyright, and it's not clear to me how you copyright a fact, nor whether you'd want to.
 
Regards

Rod

On 31 Mar 2012, at 16:02, Curtis Clark wrote:

> On 3/31/2012 1:34 AM, Roderic Page wrote:
>> If you are reusing or repurposing content then licensing becomes a big deal.
> 
> It occurs to me reading your response that nomenclatural works don't 
> really fit a lot of existing licensing models. Let's say that I wanted 
> to aggregate protologues (I actually proposed, decades ago, an "Index 
> Protologorum" for plant descriptions, using photographic techniques). On 
> the one hand, a user wants the assurance that the original has not been 
> modified; this would argue for a "no derivatives" license. On the other 
> hand, I as the aggregator might not want the extra overhead of having to 
> maintain entire monographic works just for access to the protologues 
> they contain, and the people doing the original digitization can cover 
> more ground if they are only digitizing the nomenclatural portions. It 
> would be nice to have a license that explicitly allows verbatim 
> excerpts--of course any author or publisher could write such a license, 
> but one of the biggest advantages of Creative Commons, for example, is 
> that someone with the appropriate skills has done the heavy lifting.
> 
> -- 
> Curtis Clark        http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark
> Biological Sciences                   +1 909 869 4140
> Cal Poly Pomona, Pomona CA 91768
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> 
> Taxacom Mailing List
> Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
> 
> The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of these methods:
> 
> (1) by visiting http://taxacom.markmail.org
> 
> (2) a Google search specified as:  site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here
> 

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Tel: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
Skype: rdmpage
AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage
Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com
Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html