Terms of Service

This page describes Dryad's Terms of Service policy and some background on its development.

Dryad's Terms of Service policy can be found on the Dryad website at http://datadryad.org/pages/policies. It incorporates the Dryad content policy and the Dryad privacy policy.

Background

• In 2009 the interim Dryad Consortium Board agreed to use the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) waiver for data and metadata in the repository. All data files and metadata in the repository are available for download and reuse, excepting those data files under temporary embargoes.
• The CC0 waiver reduces legal and technical impediments to the reuse of data by waiving copyright and related rights to the extent permitted by law. More background for depositors and users can be found here.
• Dryad's recommendations on data citation can be found here and here.

(CAVEAT: The remainder of this page is outdated and of historical use only. It may contain incorrect information.)

Intellectual Property and Data

• Data itself cannot be copyrighted under current law in most jurisdictions.
• Most major STM publishers are signatories to the Brussels Declaration that states the following: "Raw research data should be made freely available to all researchers. Publishers encourage the public posting of the raw data outputs of research. Sets or sub-sets of data that are submitted with a paper to a journal should wherever possible be made freely accessible to other scholars."
  • Though according to Wikipedia, publishers' practices with respect to copyrighting supplemental data may vary.
• Due to the wide variety of content Dryad accepts, it is likely there will always be a combination of copyrightable and non-copyrightable content in the repository.
  • Science Commons has published a position paper arguing that due to the different legal approaches to data in different jurisdictions, the only way to guarantee scientific progress is to waive any copyright that may exist. This argument is further elaborated in the Open Access Data Protocol and implemented in the CCZero waiver.
  • ScienceCommons data project further recommends using existing open licenses for software and the "parts of a database that can be copyrighted", like the database schema and the selection of which items are included in the database.
• Similarly, the Open Data Commons License expressly waives all rights the author/collector may have to a set of data. It is intended to be used along with a set of Community Norms that encourage (but do not enforce) good sharing practices.
• See also Bitlaw
• Patent rights, including IP on materials/reagants, and privacy rights are different issues, and need not be waived along with a waiver of copyright.

Other repositories

A sampling of terms of reuse for a variety of related repositories:

• Encyclopedia of Life - a variety of Creative Commons licenses, depending on the data source. Each image and block of text is notated with licensing information. (types of licenses used)
• Fishbase - Most content is Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported, though supposedly some photos are CC Attribution only.
• GenBank -- Does not specify terms of reuse. (See the Genbank disclaimer.)
• GBIF -- Attribution required.
• KNB -- Depositor specifies terms of reuse for each dataset.
• MorphBank -- Attribution required, commercial use requires contact with author.
• OpenContext - CC-By.
• ORNL DAAC - ?
• Pangaea - CC-By
• TreeBASE - Not specified.