Panton Principles

Consensus after a discussion between Peter Murray-Rust, Cameron Neylon and Rufus Pollock, regarding what is needed to make Open Scientific Data open and free. [1]

URL = http://pantonprinciples.org/

Description

What is needed as Open Scientific Data Licences:

"1. A simple statement is required along the forms of “best practice in data publishing is to apply protocol X”. Not a broad selection of licenses with different effects, not a complex statement about what the options are, but “best practice is X”.

2. The purpose of publishing public scientific data and collections of data, whether in the form of a paper, a patent, data publication, or deposition to a database, is to enable re-use and re-purposing of that data. Non-commercial terms prevent this in an unpredictable and unhelpful way. Share-alike and copyleft provisions have the potential to do the same under some circumstances.

3. The scientific research community is governed by strong community norms, particularly with respect to attribution. If we could successfully expand these to include share-alike approaches as a community expectation that would obviate many concerns that people attempt to address via licensing.

4. Explicit statements of the status of data are required and we need effective technical and legal infrastructure to make this easy for researchers." (http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=1939)