A peer reviewed paper has recently raised the question of open data and the NBN Secretariat wanted to remind its data partners of the approach the NBN has taken in relation to data shared through GBIF.
In 2015 Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) announced that it would be applying machine-readable data licences to all of the datasets that it holds, and that this implementation would take place in 2016. The NBN Secretariat subsequently sent out a message to its data partners in January 2016, asking for permission to transfer their datasets to GBIF under a creative commons licence. The creative commons licences offered by GBIF are inline with the creative commons licences offered by the NBN (CC0, CC BY, CC BY-NC).
The email stated:
Please can you respond to this email by 29th January 2016 with:
- A list of the datasets that you manage on the NBN Gateway that you wish to be transferred to GBIF
- The licence that you would like to assign to each of these datasets (either CC0, CC-BY, CC-BY-NC (details of these licences can be found on the creative commons website: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ )
- Confirmation that you are happy for your datasets to be transferred to GBIF at the public resolution that you have set on the NBN Gateway
It also clearly stated that: If we don’t hear from you by the 29th Jan, or if we hear that you don’t approve the transfer, we will request the removal of any datasets of yours from GBIF.
This deadline was moved a few times to allow for those who were unable to action the above points in the given time, before we then sent the details of the licensed datasets to GBIF.
Recently, GBIF contacted the NBN to let us know that they were ready to implement the machine-readable licences, and suggested that, to prevent loss of datasets from their database, they would like to license all of the datasets of those who hadn’t responded, with a CC BY-NC licence (the most restrictive on offer). The NBN Secretariat took the decision to refuse this offer, as we are not comfortable licensing datasets without the data partner’s permission, and because licences cannot be changed after they have been set. We are very aware that many members of our network are advocates of open data, and would therefore not want a restrictive licence to be applied to their records unknowingly.
Subsequently, GBIF carried out their new implementation, which involved having to drop a large number of NBN datasets, due to a lack of response from our data partners.
The NBN Secretariat will be contacting all data partners again over the next few months with data partner agreements for the new NBN Atlas. A section of this agreement allows the data partner to give permission for their licensed datasets to be transferred to GBIF. We hope that responses to these agreements will substantially increase the NBN’s representation on GBIF’s databases.
Details of the impacts of this implementation have been published in an article by GBIF.
References
Groom Q, Weatherdon L & Geijzendorffer IR. Is citizen science an open science in the case of biodiversity observations? Journal of Applied Ecology.
You may also be interested in a five paper supplement on citizen science which has been published in the open access journal BMC Ecology.
NBN Conference
The theme of this year’s NBN Conference is “Going with the flow : Supporting the NBN Data Flow Pathway”. Opening up access to data will undoubtedly feature across the two days, so why not join us for the discussion. Book before 16th September to get the early bird discount.