Licensing for blog content, source code and data

The blog content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.

IGIBS source code, i.e. the WMS Factory tool and the Mapping Application, is released under the modified BSD license. The full licence text will be included in any released source bundle.

The data licence(s) chosen depend on the original input data used. The WMS Factory tool will generate data (maps and tabular data) based on user-uploaded data which belong to their respective owners.

CHALICE: Open Licensing

Software

We commit to making source code produced as part of CHALICE available under a free software license – specifically, the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3. This is the license that was suggested to the Unlock service during consultation with OSS Watch, the open source advisory service for UK research.

GPL is a ShareAlike kind of license, implying that if someone adapts and extends the CHALICE code for use in a project or service, they should make their enhancements available to others. The Affero flavour of GPLv3 invokes the ShareAlike clause if the software is used over a network.

Data

We plan to use the Open Database License from Open Data Commons to publish the data structures extracted from EPNS – and other sources where we have the freedom to do this. ODbL is a ShareAlike license for data – the OpenStreetmap project is moving to use this license, which is especially relevant to geographic factual data.

As far as we know this will be the first time ODbL has been used for a research project of this kind – if there are other examples, would love to hear about them. We’ll seek advice from JISC Legal and from the Edinburgh Research and Innovation office legal service, as to the applicability of ODbL to research data, just to be sure.