Open Source Licenses For Academic Work? 173
An anonymous reader writes "We're in the process of submitting a scientific paper describing some techniques for data analysis. We'll be releasing the associated code, so we're faced with choosing an appropriate license. My supervisor insists there should be a citation clause, requiring any published article that uses results of the software to cite our paper. Of course, ideally, free software shouldn't have such encumbrances, and I initially tried to talk him out of it. However, in academia, the issue of attribution and citation is very important. Also, it is not a restriction on use of the software per se, only on publication of results. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any such license. So I wondered: what do other academic Slashdotters do?"
Creative Commons Attribution (Score:5, Informative)
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
Re:Creative Commons Attribution (Score:3, Informative)
He wants them to attribute when they use the results of the code, not when they use the code.
NAMD License (Score:4, Informative)
The NAMD license [uiuc.edu] has a similar clause. It might be worth looking into.
R asks nicely, and makes it easy (Score:2, Informative)
Take a look at http://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#Citing-R
Most papers to use R (or other statistical software) will in fact cite it. R makes this easy, by providing built-in citation strings. Do this, and well-behaved researchers will cite your software.
Re:Unnecessary and Silly (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah. Also, if someone uses the code to do calculations they're going to publish, then the publication is going to need to include enough information so that readers will be able to determine how the calculations worked. The easiest and most straightforward way for to accomplish that is simply to give a reference to the paper describing the code. As a concrete example, when I was a grad student and postdoc doing nuclear physics, I used this [matfys.lth.se] program to do a lot of my calculations. Every time I published a paper that included those calculations, I needed to give a reference to T. Bengtsson, Nucl. Phys. A496, 56 (1989), because that was the only way to supply the reader with enough information to be able to understand (and possibly reproduce) exactly what I'd done.
Yep. And the flip side of the ethical necessity for giving proper citations is that it's totally unethical to try to force someone to cite your work via some kind of artificial legal mechanism. Getting your work cited is the gold coin of academia, just as getting votes is the gold coin of politics. Forcing someone to cite your paper against their best judgment is as unethical as forcing someone to vote for you against their best judgment.
Re:Creative Commons Attribution (Score:3, Informative)
FSF ruled that a website using PHPNuke (GPL) had to retain the copyright notices for PHPNuke on page footers and in the Generator metatag since this was generated by the CMS code.
And this copyright notice will be present on the generated pages footer and in the HTML source as a Metatag called Generator. Those messages are now compliant with the 2(c) section of the GPL license and CAN'T BE REMOVED.
http://phpnuke.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=6966 [phpnuke.org]
Re:Enforcing the license? (Score:3, Informative)
'
This was exactly my thought, we GPL all the software out of our lab. We also have a prominent notice on our download page giving the proper journal citation for this particular piece of software, so users know what to put.
However to not cite software used, particularly when the exact citation line is given to you so easily, in academic would be considered academic dishonesty. Sloppy as you said. And would reflect very poorly on the author of the paper if it were ever to come to light.
Since you can't really enforce it without a costly lawsuit, you simply have to have faith other academics will follow the same attribution code to cite sources, including software.
What might be more useful is writing this to a prominent journal in your field as a letter to bring attention to this issue, to help teach those older academics who never thought about the issues of citing software.'
Outside of a few fringe cases where the paper is about software citing software would be a little silly. Unless use of the software is implicit to the use of a source of data like a database.
You cite sources of information (including information that influenced your conclusions) not tools. That is akin to claiming an art student should cite the brush, canvas, and paint used in each painting. It doesn't matter how novel any of those things were unless the painting was a demonstration of the tool in question. Only sources that inspired the work need be cited.
Re:what's wrong with priority? (Score:3, Informative)
Why GPL? I would expect that when one is publishing academic research, one would want to license any accompanying code under a license that is as compatible as possible with whatever code other researchers are using. That would be something like BSD.
Re:Citation clause (Score:3, Informative)
BTW is your suoervisor actually the author of any of the software? If not perhaps you could keep him happy by attaching his terms to the copies of the software distributed with the paper and then release it under your preferred terms elsewhere.
As a student/researcher any work the OP did as part of his studies at the university would typically be considered by a court to be the copyright property of the university, at least in as much as they provided the resources (tuition, guidance, computer facilities, access to research grants) that were used to produce it and/or provide the OP with money to live on while it was produced.
IANAL; this is not legal advice. It's true, though.
Follow Cloudy's lead (Score:1, Informative)
The Cloudy software package (http://www.nublado.org) as been around since the 70's. It has averaged over 50 citations each year for the past decade, and has well over 100 citations so far this year. Their only license is this text at the beginning of the user manual:
Use of this program is not restricted provided each use is acknowledged upon publication. The bibliographic reference to this version of Cloudy is "version xx.xx of the code last described by Ferland, G.J., et al 1998, PASP, 110, 761-778." The version number, shown here as "xx.xx", should be given and can be found on the first lines of the code's output.
Re:Enforcing the license? (Score:3, Informative)
I hate to be a lame AOL'er, but "me too" where me is all the people I work with: software is GPL, try to encourage people to cite (or in many cases just put a quick mention in the acknowledgements) any appropriate papers when publishing.
A (marginally) interesting counter-example is healpix [nasa.gov], code used by astronomers for all sky maps (especially of CMB [wikipedia.org] data, its original use case). It was originally released with such a citation clause, which caused much annoyance among people who wanted to use the code for little things, as well as make it difficult (impossible) to incorporate into existing astronomical software which is Free (GPL'ed etc.). Cooler heads prevailed, and the restriction has since been rescinded, although they still request attribution in the same manner as they had required before.
CPAL is the Common Public Attribution License 1.0 (Score:2, Informative)
SocialText, makers of wiki software, created a license that may be just what the OP is looking for and it is OSI approved.
Gaussian (Score:2, Informative)
Here are two examples (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.mfa.kfki.hu/~labar/ProcDif.htm [mfa.kfki.hu]
Labar published an article describing the work in a scholarly, refereed journal and then distributed the code(he chose an executable) with a request for citation.
You could also look at the EMAN2 project
http://blake.bcm.tmc.edu/eman/eman2/ [tmc.edu]
EMAN2 is distributed as open source. The authors also published the work in a scholarly, refereed journal.