Background

The myExperiment Virtual Research Environment (VRE), funded by JISC  and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC),  enables scientific communities to share digital items associated with their research (myExperiment is funded as part of JISC’s Virtual Research Environment programme and SCA is a 3-year initiative funded as part of JISC’s capital programme).  In particular it uses Web 2.0 technologies in order to enable these communities to find, share and execute scientific workflows, which include text, diagrams and data, using a range of Creative Commons licences. If the user wants further access, and the ability to upload and share workflows, they will need to sign up. The software that powers myexperiment.org is also downloadable so that a user can run their own instances of myExperiment.

Key content features

• Multiple types of content: data, documents (literary works), diagrams (graphical works) and data compilations
• Differentiation between content and meta-content: the users of the myExperiment VRE upload content but also produce meta-content in the form of tags (ie text and compilations of hyperlink) and comments (text)

Key value gains

• Collective gains for the research community from incremental innovation
• Individual gains for the researchers in terms of personal reputation, research visibility and citation
• Better understanding of the ways in which e-science communities interact
• Coordination gains from associating and linking researchers doing related work
• Collaboration gains from the creation of scientific groups and communities of practice

Rights ownership and obtained permissions

• The copyright in the myExperiment website unless stated otherwise, belongs to the University of Manchester and the University of Southampton
• The actual content of the site (workflows and other files) are licensed under one of the three available Creative Commons licences (Terms of access and use for a more detailed presentation of the licensing schemes).The Universities of Manchester and Southampton do not obtain any special permission from the owners of the content uploaded on the myExperiment service other than the ones awarded to the general public through the Creative Commons licences

Terms of access and use

The end-user may both upload and download e-content. In the process of uploading e-content, the end-user also decides on the licence under which their work is to be made available.

myExperiment offers a range of only three of the Creative Commons licences:

• Creative Commons Attribution (CC–BY): this is a non-exclusive licence allowing the licensee to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the original work under the condition that the work is attributed in the manner specified by the author of the work or the licensor and in accordance to the terms of the licence. The Creative Commons Attribution licence is the most liberal of all CC licences in the sense that it provides the maximum range of freedoms with respect to the work for the licensee
• Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (CC–BY–SA): this is a non-exclusive licence allowing the licensee to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the original work under the condition that the work is attributed in the manner specified by the author of the work or the licensor and in accordance to the terms of the licence. The licensee is also allowed to build upon (Eg extend, reuse, repurpose) the original work, provided they share the resulting work under the same conditions. This is the default licence suggested by MyExperiment service as it is the licence most compatible with other open-content licences (Particularly the GNU Free Documentation Licence that is also used to licence the Wikipedia content. See )
• Creative Commons Attribution–No Derivatives (CC–BY–ND): This non-exclusive licence allows the licensee to copy, distribute and transmit the work under the following conditions: (a) the work is attributed in the manner specified by the author of the work or the licensor and in accordance to the terms of the licence; (b) the licensee does not alter, transform or build upon the work. For the licensee, this is the most restrictive Creative Commons licence as it confers the most limited set of permissions to the licensee

myExperiment offers only the Creative Commons licences that do not contain the Non-Commercial Licence element. The inclusion of the Non-Commercial Licence element would not allow the end-user to use the licensed work for any commercial purposes. There are three reasons why this option is not offered to the end-user:

• Most of the free/open source licences do not contain such a section and hence this is outside the culture of the communities that are most likely to use this content
• The less than clear definition of the Non-Commercial element is a cause of concern. Besides the problem of setting its scope, it is not compatible with any other open-content licences
• The value for the copyright owner that licences the work does not come from direct commercial exploitation of the work and hence there is no point using a Non-Commercial element

  The works that have been used for the file that is to be uploaded may also be defined, thus ensuring a minimum of provenance.

Various model of openness are adopted, depending upon the nature of the user and the type of the community. For example:

1. Open from the beginning model (Bio-mathematicians). The objective is to communicate the research results as fast as possible with proper attribution of the originator of the results, so that other scientists are able to work with them. Hence, the licence with the least possible limitations of use is chosen. In this case, more liberal CC licences (CC–BY) are offered.
2. Controlled model (Social statisticians). The accuracy and integrity of the data is the primary objective in this case. Hence, while there is need to communicate them, it is also necessary that the licensees do not make any changes or commercially use the data. In these cases, more restrictive licences are chosen (CC–BY–ND).
3. Open but hierarchical model (Chemists). The hierarchical structure of this community is expressed in the levels of control claimed over the data: the higher the position of the researcher in the hierarchy, the more likely to use a restrictive licence. The lower someone in the hierarchy, the more open the licences. In this case, CC–B (Supra ft. 14)  are permitted after a period of time.
4. Open after a period of time (Astronomers): The six months period required before making the data available using the most liberal licence equals the innovation cycle in the field. After that period, the producer of the data has probably moved to the next innovation cycle and her data may be made freely available to the rest of the community. In this case, the CC–BY is offered.

Links accessed April 2012.