Add a process to manage intellectual property of contributions

[shoaibsufi]

Describe the change being requested
Create a process that allows the transfer of intellectual property of contributions to the SSI partners for additions to the EOG

State the reason for the change
Currently the Intellectual Property (IP) of any additions is owned by the person or their institution that contributes changes - the current basis for including them is by then agreeing to publish them using a CC-BY-NC license - but we may want to be able to publish the guide with a different license hence the need to manage the IP

Describe the impact of the change on other parts of the SSI-EOG
This would impact all additions to the guide by non SSI partner institution staff

Describe any alternatives you have considered (if applicable)
We could leave things as they are and use licensing to include contributions, but this might curtail what we can do with the guide in the future.

Additional context
Managing the intellectual property is different that compatible licensing of contributions

[npch]

Do you have a definition for what you consider a substantial contribution? Also, is the sole concern relicensing, or is there the additional concern of contribution of copyright material?

There are two established processes for dealing with this coming from the open source community:

1. Contributor licensing agreements
2. Lightweight CLAs / DCOs

From the relicensing perspective, both have very much fallen out of favour, as the burden on the contributor increases, and the ongoing burden on the coordinator, and it turns out that relicensing happens much less often than is expected, and should be a difficult thing to do. There's been a lot written up about why this results in a large drop-off of occasional contributors.

If there's an additional concern about the contribution of copyright / unlicensed material, best practice is that this is now mostly done by lightweight contributor declarations which reduce the burden on the contributor but have an equivalent high burden on the coordinator.

My suggestion would be that if it's only relicensing that is the issue, I would suggest using an appropriate choice of license to solve the problem, and using CC-BY as the license. This allows for easy relicensing and reuse. In any case, CC-BY-NC is practically unenforceable and useless in many of the contexts we work in. (In retrospect, using CC-BY-NC for the SSI at the start was a very bad choice).

[shoaibsufi]

Thanks Neil - I shall update my thinking - nice to see there has been work on the effect of CLA's - I think what we will do is try and trial doing something like this at CW21 and see how we fare/FAIR : )

[shoaibsufi]

Triage meeting - 2020-12-14. (comments incorporated from @npch)

We will change EOG to CC-BY as this is now the default for SSI material (unless something falls into a specific exploitable category - e.g. news or some types of tutorials - where we expect to be charging money on an ongoing basis)

[npch]

If we are looking to use something similar to DCOs or CLAs for contributors, here's a recent thread on the RSE Slack: https://ukrse.slack.com/archives/C035G68RF/p1606331258396600 - I've also extracted the relevant links below.

Links to overview of DCOs:

• https://producingoss.com/en/contributor-agreements.html#developer-certificate-of-origin

Examples of DCOs in action:

• https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
• https://probot.github.io/apps/dco/

Some info on CLAs and CLAs vs DCOs:

• https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/forge-your-future/9781680506389/f_0035.xhtml#sect.cla
• Collect resources for a subchapter on Contributors License Agreements the-turing-way/the-turing-way#1182
• https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2014/jun/09/do-not-need-cla/

[shoaibsufi]

I am going to suggest that CC-BY solves most of our problems and that we close this ticket - something for a triage meeting and to pass by @npch