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_creative_commons

<quote>

The UK government has in recent years made significant amounts of
government data openly available for reuse.  They Work for You is an
example of a website which creatively reuses data on UK parliamentary
activity,  and its parent organization, MySociety, has played an
important role in encouraging the UK government towards opening up
more data.

The latest development in UK government open data sharing is the
launch of data.gov.uk, launched in beta test form last month , which
=93provides a single access point to over 2,500 central government
datasets that have been made available for free re-use=94.

Buried in the small print of this announcement is an important change,
with significant implications for open access publishing in the UK.
This change is the adoption of Creative Commons-compatible licensing
for UK government open content.

Up until now, open data  from the UK government was licensed via the
Office of Public Sector Information=92s =91Click Use=92 license scheme. The
Click Use model required any potential users or distrubutors of the
data to first request their own =91Click Use=92 license from the UK
government website, in order to gain permission to reuse the data.

In contrast musicians, artists and other creators around the world who
wish to share content openly while reserving some rights have
increasingly standardized on the use of  Creative Commons licenses,
which do not require any such license request to be made.

BioMed Central, like many other open access publishers, uses the
Creative Commons Attribution License, which requires only that the
original version of the work should be correctly attributed when the
work or any part of it is reused.

Until now, because work carried out by researchers at UK government
agencies is often covered by =91Crown Copyright=92, and because Crown
Copyright is legally distinct from the normal Copyright law, the
applicability of Creative Commons licenses to such work has been in
question. As a result, special license wording has in some cases been
necessary for such articles published in BioMed Central journals, in
order to indicate that they can be reused only under the =91Click use=92
scheme. This had the potential to cause delays for authors and
confusion for readers.

The good news is that the announced intention of OPSI to move away
from =91Click Use=92 licensing towards Creative Commons-compatible
licensing over the coming months should entirely solve this problem,
making life easier for all concerned.

It also provides an important precedent for dealing with similar
challenges in other (rather arcane) areas of copyright law. For
example, the World Health Organization and other supra-national bodies
do not recognize national jurisdictions, which causes similar
challenges for Creative Commons licensing to those caused by Crown
Copyright,  and requires similar workarounds via special-case license
wording. BioMed Central is hopeful that a Creative Commons-compatible
licensing scheme specifically designed for such supra-national bodies
will soon resolve this and we are working with WHO and Creative
Commons towards such a solution.

</quote>

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_creative_commons