Recommended data license for MBON affiliated datasets mobilized to OBIS-USA

[MathewBiddle]

We should provide a recommendation for which license to select.

Highly recommend CC0 1.0 see http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0

With this license the publisher has waived all rights to these data ,to the extent possible under law, and has dedicated them to the public domain. Users may copy, modify, distribute and use the work, including for commercial purposes, without restriction.

OBIS Manual reference https://manual.obis.org/policy.html#data-sharing-agreement

cc @albenson-usgs @sformel-usgs

[MathewBiddle]

@laurabrenskelle Do you know what NCEI's recommendations are w.r.t. data licensing?

I think OBIS-USA can allow for more strict licensing which NCEI will not accept. We should be advising on the license that allows data to go through OBIS-USA to NCEI.

[albenson-usgs]

"I think OBIS-USA can allow for more strict licensing which NCEI will not accept."

Yes this is the case. The licenses a data provider can choose are CC-0, CC-BY, and CC-BY-NC. NCEI will accept CC-0 and CC-BY but not CC-BY-NC so those datasets do not get archived at NCEI. Also worth noting that last I understood data with a CC-BY-NC license was not included in the GBIF cloud exports and so is not available to people who want to access the data via AWS or other cloud instances.