[GOAL] OASPA's ironic demonstration of the inadequacy of CC-BY for data mining

[Heather Morrison]

The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)'s chart illustrating the growth of the CC-BY license ironically demonstrates the inadequacy of the license for data mining. This chart is posted in image format on a CC-BY licensed blog. The data per se has not been posted for download, and there is no explanation of the method of data capture. One could copy out the data points manually, with some estimation, for manipulation. However, this blogpost illustrates very well that a work can be CC-BY licensed but virtually useless for data mining.

I would contrast this with my similar data set for The Dramatic Growth of Open Access, which for years has been available through a CC-BY-NC-SA license. The full dataset is available for anyone, anywhere to download and manipulate. This practice is probably not optimal for several reasons. The most important from the perspective of data manipulation, I suspect, is because I use an excel spreadsheet. I suspect csv format would be more useful. I'd  appreciate some advice on this; perhaps this will be an emerging role for librarians? Public domain for the data per se would make more sense. What's needed here is a way to manage granting credit to the dataset creator that doesn't impose restrictive terms on the data per se.

Links:
OASPA ironically demonstrates limitations of CC-BY:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/03/open-access-scholarly-publishers.html

OASPA growth in the use of the CC-BY license:
http://oaspa.org/growth-in-use-of-the-cc-by-license-2/

Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2006/08/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-series.html

Where to download full data:
http://summit.sfu.ca/item/10990

best,

Heather G. Morrison, PhD
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com