Open Source Licenses For Academic Work?

An anonymous reader writes "We're in the process of submitting a scientific paper describing some techniques for data analysis. We'll be releasing the associated code, so we're faced with choosing an appropriate license. My supervisor insists there should be a citation clause, requiring any published article that uses results of the software to cite our paper. Of course, ideally, free software shouldn't have such encumbrances, and I initially tried to talk him out of it. However, in academia, the issue of attribution and citation is very important. Also, it is not a restriction on use of the software per se, only on publication of results. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any such license. So I wondered: what do other academic Slashdotters do?"

Comments

Creative Commons Attribution

[xous]

Not one of 'em crazy academics but wouldn't this do?

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Re:Creative Commons Attribution

[IWannaBeAnAC]

If you accept the basic premise of EULA's, which specify a contract, then that contract can do basically anything it likes, within the law.

Existing EULA's can and do put restraints on what you are allowed to do with an application. Consider for example 'student' versions of software, such as Matlab, Visual C++, etc, that cannot be used for commercial or research purposes. Also a lot of scientific software has a 'no commercial use' clause.

Re:Creative Commons Attribution

[hey!]

He wants them to attribute when they use the results of the code, not when they use the code.

Personally, I think this wrong-headed.

It seems to me that one of two cases apply: the software in question is critical to reproducing the results presented, in which case it would be mandatory to cite the software in any real peer reviewed paper. Or the software is not critical in reproducing the results, in which case the developers don't merit citation in the paper, although they may be deserving of gratitude and a pat on the pack.

For example, should people who used LaTex or Open Office to prepare printed materials used in the course of their research cite those products? Only if the particular materials produced could only be produced in precise form by that software.

Now suppose you used postscript to produce images used for vitual perception experiments. Well, you'd probably want to publish the routines, and certainly stipulate they ran on such and so a Postscript implementation, if there were any chance at all that different implementations would render those images differently.

Now, in cases where results are produced that are dependent on a particular piece of software, whether that software be proprietary, open source, or in the public domain, it is academically dishonest NOT to cite the software, in my opinion.

Re:Creative Commons Attribution

[julesh]

If you accept the basic premise of EULA's, which specify a contract, then that contract can do basically anything it likes, within the law.

Existing EULA's can and do put restraints on what you are allowed to do with an application. Consider for example 'student' versions of software, such as Matlab, Visual C++, etc, that cannot be used for commercial or research purposes. Also a lot of scientific software has a 'no commercial use' clause.

Before I begin: IANAL. I have, however, read widely on law, particularly copyright and contract law. The following is not legal advice.

What you say is true, as far as it goes.

But you see, saying "you can use this program, as long as what you are doing falls into one of these categories" is entirely different from stating what you can do with the output of the program after you've finished using the program.

Contracts have limits on what they can achieve, and when the requirements of a contract start to seem too onerous, courts tend to decide that the contract's aims are outside of the scope of a contract.

I've never seen a relevant test, but I would expect that a contract that attempts to stifle the freedom of speech of one its parties would be very difficult to enforce, except in very specific circumstances. Such circumstances would probably include stuff like near-equality of bargaining power between the parties, which isn't the case here (where there's a producer/consumer relationship). Contracts that cannot be simply terminated without leaving behind residual obligations are harder to form, too. In this case, you can't just say, "I don't agree to that any more" and stop using the software, because you still have the results that you obtained from the software.

My suggestion to the OP is quite simply this: pick any OSS license you like. I'm fond of BSD/MIT style licenses, and they are (as you can guess by the names) popular with academic institutions, at least in the field of CS. Release the software under that license, and put a note in the documentation politely asking people publishing results obtained from the software to include a citation to the paper about it. Include suitable example references in a number of formats, so it's particularly easy to cite.

Really, people will want to provide a citation. It backs up their paper with more depth, provides additional information about the methods they have used and gives the reader more confidence in their results to know how they were derived.

Why not just trust people?

Enforcing the license?

[haluness]

So, if you were to get such a license and then somebody published a result without citing your software (as opposed to mentioning that they used the software), how would you (or your boss) enforce it?

Would your boss really sue another academic for not citing the software?

Of course, as an academic myself, not citing the paper for some software that I used, is sloppy anyway.

Re:Enforcing the license?

[goombah99]

or Boo Hoo, what if someone read your paper and then did not cite it in their derivative work?

Citations are a matter of academic integrity and publishing ethics not law.

Re:Enforcing the license?

[trainman]

This was exactly my thought, we GPL all the software out of our lab. We also have a prominent notice on our download page giving the proper journal citation for this particular piece of software, so users know what to put.

However to not cite software used, particularly when the exact citation line is given to you so easily, in academic would be considered academic dishonesty. Sloppy as you said. And would reflect very poorly on the author of the paper if it were ever to come to light.

Since you can't really enforce it without a costly lawsuit, you simply have to have faith other academics will follow the same attribution code to cite sources, including software.

What might be more useful is writing this to a prominent journal in your field as a letter to bring attention to this issue, to help teach those older academics who never thought about the issues of citing software.

Re:Enforcing the license?

[iter8]

We do the same, release the software under the GPL along with a request to cite the proper journal references. You can't really enforce that, but we seem to get plenty of citations, so I think it's an honor system that mostly works. When I review a paper, I try to make sure the authors cite the software they use and if the paper describes original software, they release it. I don't really trust the results from black-box software.

NAMD License

[Anonymous Coward]

The NAMD license has a similar clause. It might be worth looking into.

Unnecessary and Silly

[logicnazi]

Your academic papers don't have such a licensce. They are cited because it's considered unethical not to do so. The same would apply to using your source code.

Also, your license can't actually enforce the citation clause. I mean whoever uses the code won't necessarily be the same person who writes the paper. Additionally I have some doubts that the kind of clause you are interested in would be legally enforceable.

Science works because we trust other scientists to cite our work if they use it. If we kept our work secret unless other scientists signed agreements to do so nothing would get done.

Re:Unnecessary and Silly

[TheRaven64]

Why not look at some of licenses to come out of academia, the MIT license (from MIT) and the BSD license (from UCB), or the University of Illinois Open Source license? All of these are roughly equivalent. There are a few issues:

• If your work was publicly funded, then a permissive license is the only ethical solution, since it is the only way of ensuring that your work benefits those who funded it.
• Citation, as you point out, is an ethical issue, not a legal one. If someone uses your work and doesn't cite you, then this is unethical. Pursuing them legally is expensive (will your organisation fund this?) while a letter to the editor of the publishing journal is cheap and more likely to have the desired effect. If you include a note in the documentation suggesting the paper to cite, most people will (it's easier than thinking, and bulks out the references section...)
• You are in academia. Your value as an academic is measured by your reputation. The more people use (or are aware of) your work, the greater this reputation will be. Any clause in a license which limits distribution or use is going to harm your reputation in the long run.

Re:Unnecessary and Silly

[TheRaven64]

Best of all, provide a short list of papers about the software and BibTeX for all of them somewhere easy-to-find in the program documentation. I've only used one program that did this, but it makes life a lot easier when writing a paper relating to it - rather than having to hunt some vaguely-relevant reference, you just paste the BibTeX into your .bib file and you're done.

Ask nicely.

[JustinOpinion]

To be honest, I think your best option is: "Ask nicely."

Seriously, academia and publishing and citation is a massive reputation system. It almost entirely works on the honor system, with formal inquiries occurring (rarely) when there are major transgressions. Let's say you find or write some complicated open-source license that requires citation. The code will still be available. Unscrupulous people could still use the code and publish without citation. Do you really think you (or your supervisor) would ever bother suing them? I highly doubt it. But you would certainly spread the word that these researchers don't cite properly. You would certainly bring up this issue during peer review. This is where the real damage to them will occur.

So, my recommendation is to just skip the middle-man, and don't bother with the unconventional FOSS license (which would just confuse people who want to use the software but won't ever publish anything). Wherever you post the code, just include a prominent request (on webpage, in README, and code headers) along the lines of "If you publish any work that uses this software, please cite XXX." Most scientists would be happy to add that citation. The only ones who wouldn't are the ones who try to pass off other's work as their own: do you really think they care about respecting copyright?

This is, at least, the procedure used in my field. Publish your paper. Release the code using a standard FOSS license.. Add a citation request. Done.

BSD, MIT, etc licenses

[Timothy Brownawell]

The BSD license is from UC Berkeley, the MIT license is of course from MIT, llvm is from the University of Illinois / NCSA and uses a license almost identical to the BSD license, etc. For some reason, this sort of "free as in knowledge" type license seems to be rather popular among educational institutions.

My supervisor insists there should be a citation clause, requiring any published article that uses results of the software to cite our paper.

That is a restriction on how it can be used, and I seriously doubt it is at all compatible with Open Source. It certainly wouldn't be compatible with Free-as-in-FSF software.

pointless

[jipn4]

If they use your software in a manner that, from an academic point of view, requires citation, then they are going to cite you anyway if they are honest.

If they use your software in a manner that, from an academic point of view, does not require citation, then your clause puts them in a difficult position. For example, their editor might insist the citation be removed, but then your license kicks in.

Besides, how are you going to enforce this anyway? Are you going to sue? What kind of damages and remedies are you going to put in there?

I have been there: just use a standard license.

[Noksagt]

Just pick a standard OSI license, tell people who want to cite it how they can, and trust that it will work out. Don't try to force people to use your software in any peculiar way, even if that way does not seem "evil."

I asked a related question here several years ago. I have completed my schooling and released some open source software, some of which has been used and cited.

Copyright licenses generally protect holders from having others distribute their works in a way that they do not want. They do not place many restrictions on how the legally obtained work can be used. You might be able to use an end user license agreement that attempts to mandate citation & worse restrictions (such as not being able to publish software benchmarks) have certainly been imposed. Some authors even mandate registration before others can receive the source code & can then see who may be using but not citing their software. But I think this may actually be counterproductive & it certainly wouldn't be considered free software.

Academic integrity necessitates describing your work accurately in such a way that others can reproduce it. To do this, others will need to say what software they used to obtain the results they publish & they should choose to cite you. This won't always happen, but it will probably happen more frequently than you or your advisor think. It is certainly valid to write or call other academics who you know use your program and ask that they cite your paper in the future. In extreme situations, you can send a note to the editor of the journal that considers such papers that didn't cite your work & most editors will err on the side of strongly encouraging authors to add a citation.

Most other free/open source software that is used a lot in the sciences does not have a EULA of the type you subscribe, yet many are popular & are cited. They may have a FAQ entry or a mention in their README on what should be cited, but they don't try to make it legally binding.

You should ask yourself why you want to release it as free and open source software. Presumably, you hope that others will use it (obscurity is a worse threat than piracy) & maybe even to help you improve it. You also probably want to obtain some kind of academic prestige (which can come not only in the form of citation, but also from name recognition of both the program and the authors of that software). The best way to get this to happen is to write a solid piece of work that can do something that other works that cost (financially, time invested, and responsibilities involved) the same or less can't do as well and that other people want to do. Use a standard FSF/DFSG/OSI license (such as the GPL) & trust that everything else will work out. Getting quirky will discourage use of your software.

this is going the opposite direction, though

[Trepidity]

A clause like this is attempting to inflate citation counts beyond what would normally be expected, mainly by forcing even marginal use to result in a citation when often it wouldn't merit one (I don't cite, say, the manual for the Dell computer I use).

Use a well-known license

[klapaucjusz]

Two points to keep in mind:

• don't write your own license, use a well-known license that people already understand;
• don't include an advertising clause.

You may be able to convince your supervisor by citing the examples of BSD Unix and X11, which brought fame and money to their creators (the CSG at Berkeley, and project Athena at MIT) while using extremely liberal licenses -- the MIT/X11 license (which is what I use for my research) and the 4-clause BSD license, albeit with the advertising clause not being enforced.

You may also want to cite the following anegdote. Two years ago, I was compiling a Linux LiveCD for our first, second and third year undergrads. One of the pieces of software I wanted to include was a Prolog compiler from a well-known Portuguese university which we use in third-year courses.

Unfortunately, the Prolog implementation was covered by a fairly strict license that would significantly complicate our distribution process. After a few exchanges of e-mail with the copyright holders, they told us that we were welcome to do whatever we wanted, but they'd not change the license for us.

After consulting with our legal department, we decided we could not include the Prolog compiler.

I'd Check With Your Legal Dept. First

[NeverVotedBush]

Since you are asking which license to publish under, it sounds like you haven't done this within the framework of whatever institution where you are working.

It could very well be (probably be?) that the license you have to publish under is already set and that you are legally bound to follow it.

Depending on who funded the research, there could be other restrictions and obligations as well.

Certain funding institutions require there be no copyright at all, while others may have some agreement in place that you might violate if you don't investigate this first.

Stuff like this is how you can lose funding - not just for yourself, but for the institution. And the legal issues, under the wrong circumstances, could end up haunting you.