ChemSpider Blog

Over the past year ChemSpider has been challenged over the nature of our offering in terms of Open Data etc. A small number of people focused a lot of time talking about this while we remained focused on improving the website and having it available for people to use as a Free Access website. I spoke to Peter Suber about Open Access and then John Willbanks about Creative Commons.

Since ChemSpider is the aggregate of a number of people’s work (including provision of software by collaborators) I had to get into conversation to see what licenses would be acceptable to those groups.

With the redesign of the website we have structured ourselves in a way to add licenses as we see appropriate now. So, as of today we have added the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 United States License and the appropriate logo is on all sections of a Record View except for the predicted properties. Once we get approval from our collaborators for this same license (and discussions are underway) then the whole record view will be Licensed.

At that point, you are free :

• to Share — to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
• to Remix — to make derivative works

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
• Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 12:23 am and is filed under Community Building, Open Access Publishing, Quality and Content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.