It’s been a long time since I’ve had much of an opportunity to blog, or digest many of the important developments that have been taking place in the world of open access and open science.

First off, I had the pleasure of attending the Creative Commons 5th anniversary party. Besides enjoying myself, it was a great chance to reflect on how far Creative Commons has come. Millions of people and sites using their licenses, important projects in Science and Education, and continuing and growing buzz and energy.

Creative Commons made some recent announcements at the party and after that are important for archaeologists and for our planning for cyber-infrastructure. Here’s an update:

(1) CC-Zero: CC-Zero is a new protocol that lets people assert that content has no legal restrictions associated with it, or lets them sign a waiver removing all rights associated with a work. It is similar to a public domain dedication, but (in the words of Creative Commons) “The key addition is that the assertion that content is in the public domain will be vouched for by users, so that there is a platform for reputation systems to develop. People will then be able to judge the reliability of content’s copyright status based on who has done the certifying.” In other words, this seems like a way of trying to get encourage certainty that an item of content really IS in the public domain.

(2) Community Norms: One of the interesting recent developments out of Creative Commons (especially Science Commons) is the growing emphasis on relying on social norms (see this link). Social norms are an important force in science (and the humanities), and many researchers probably mistake the social norms of their fields with copyright or other legal protections. For example, archaeologists (and other researchers) have been publishing non-copyrightable facts for a long time, these include counts of species, dimensions of artifacts, etc. You’re still expected to cite the people who published these facts, even though the facts are in the public domain. This is an example of a powerful and good social norm.

(3) Open Data Protocol: Here’s where everything above comes together. The new Science Commons “Open Data Protocol” discusses the issues of copyright, factual (non copyrightable) data, interoperability, attribution, and community norms. It is an impressive and needed document, and makes a very clear and compelling case for moving away from the traditional Creative Commons approach of leveraging copyright licenses to encourage (or mandate) good behavior such as citation and attribution.

Scientific data repositories are typically full of content that is both “expressive” (subject to copyright) and “factual” (not subject to copyright). Data sources are also highly global, and therefore subject to all sorts of legal jurisdictions and rules. Because of all of these legal complexities, it becomes very difficult to achieve legal interoperability between data from different data repositories (that may have different terms of use, license frameworks, or may be subject to different legal systems). This case is clearly made in their document.

The solution that Science Commons advocates is to essentially move all open science data repositories to a common legal baseline, which is basically the public domain. This is very different to the “traditional” (if one can speak of traditional in the context of a 5 year old organization) Creative Commons approach of “some rights reserved” copyright licensing. Science Commons argues against licensing or other legal instruments to mandate “good” behavior (such as citation and attribution) of data resources, because these seem legal unworkable and have many practical problems. Instead, citation and acknowledgments of data contributions should be the province of social norms, and not legally enforced. Scientific data repositories that want to be “open” should shape their terms of use, copyright, and other policies so their content is essentially public domain and freely remixable with other resources.

Comments: Wow! This Science Commons development is very impressive, and very compelling.

Unfortunately, I think it’s very likely to freak out a large portion of the archaeological community. Science Commons is simply so far ahead of our community, that I worry about how this will be received.

I just gave a paper at the recent American Schools of Oriental Research meeting in San Diego. I presented our recent work with Prof. Martha Joukowsky to publish 15 years of her excavations at the Great Temple of Petra (see here, and here) in Open Context. This content is licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution license, the most open of their licensing choices. This was very generous and forward looking of Prof. Joukowsky.

To illustrate how far we have to go to advocate “openness”, in the Q&A part of my talk, someone in the audience advocated legally registering the copyright of archaeological content. That way, one could sue for damages in infringement. Ugh, so the discussion turned from how to share our data to how to sue each other for copyright infringement. Given some of the audience reaction to the discussion, it seems very clear that in Near Eastern archaeology, there is very little faith in “social norms”. A good fraction of my audience seemed to believe that their community was so dysfunctional that they needed legal protections.

Thus, while I a agree with the arguments in Open Data Protocol, I believe a large portion of the archaeological community has a long way to go. It will take many more examples of datasets like Petra to move this community from secrecy and suspicion. Sigh, we truly have our work cut out for us.

Update: Peter Suber (as always) has excellent commentary on these developments.