Copyright, licensing, and citation are relevant to all creative works, including datasets, visualisations, and products created by Open Development, as well as all other data and information that is published by Open Development. This is a complicated topic. This document outlines these concepts very generally, and how to apply them in the context of Open Development.

Copyright refers to the legal rights of the creator of a product to publish, distribute and use this product. These rights belong to a group of rights that are referred to as “intellectual property”. Copyright is a legal concept that is treated differently in different jurisdictions. There is no such thing as an “international copyright”, although there is an international convention to which some countries (not including the Mekong Countries) have signed on.

Copyright is different from a license.

These are the options for copyright on CKAN:

Choose the correct option based on the below sections.

All products created by Open Development are copyrighted.

Different products may or may not be copyrighted.

Laws, policies, and administrative documents in official languages generally should not be, although the translations might be. International conventions and policies are generally not copyrighted. If republishing these types of documents on Open Development, copyright should be presumed no.

For the purposes of other products not created by Open Development that are being made available on the Open Development platforms, such as reports, news articles, or research briefs, copyright should be presumed “yes” unless it specifically states otherwise. To find information on copyright, you may need to review the website, the documents themselves, and any documentation titled “terms of use”, “disclaimer”, “legal”, and other similar documents. There may also be relevant copyright and intellectual property laws in your jurisdiction that you can review if you want a better general understanding of how copyright works in your jurisdiction.

If all of the above have been reviewed, including laws, and it is still unclear as to whether a document has copyright or not, “unclear copyright” can be selected. However, this circumstance is unlikely to arise frequently.

There is an option to select “to be determined”. This option should only be selected if the copyright details of the dataset are still being determined. This option allows other users to know that more work is going to be done on this dataset and that it should not yet be published and made public. Datasets where “to be determined” has been selected will not be made public until this option has been changed.

(from the Open Data Handbook and Open Definition)

A product may be copyrighted, but the creator may have decided to license their right to publish, distribute, and use the product to other people. There are some licenses that are purchased, such as those in the traditional publishing, movie, and music industries. These do not conform with the Open Definition. There are other licenses that are given freely. Some of these licenses conform with the principles set forth in the Open Definition, including the following:

See more at: http://opendefinition.org/licenses/

• Domain = Domain of application, i.e. what type of material this license should/can be applied to. Note if you are looking for an open license for software, please see Open Source Definition conforming licenses.
• BY = requires attribution
• SA = require share-alike

These are the options that are currently available on CKAN:

This is the default option:

Choose the correct option based on the below sections. Please log an issue on GitHub if the document you are uploading specifies a license that is not covered by these options.

All datasets and data products created by Open Development are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Not all products will have licensing specified. The presumption for all products not created by Open Development is that there is no license unless specified. If licensing information cannot be found, then it should be assumed that this document does not have a specified license, and this option should be chosen on CKAN.

A product may be copyrighted, with all rights reserved, and no licensing information provided. In this case, this document is not shareable on CKAN.

A product may be copyrighted, with all rights reserved, with no licensing information provided, but with rights modified by additional access and use constraints, terms of use, or other similar documentation. You will need to check the document or the main website for this information. If no licensing information has been provided, but the document is permitted to be reused and republished if certain requirements are followed, then choose the option of “no license specified” on CKAN, and indicate the access and use constraints in the relevant CKAN metadata field. For archived webpages, refer the user back to the original webpage to see access and use constraints and provide the original URL.

Citing references used is good research practice. It is also referred to as “attribution” and is part of an open, transparent approach. In some cases, it is also required by a particular license, term of use, or access and use constraint. Different licenses and requirements may have a particular preferred way of citation. However, even if a “preferred” form is proposed by a product/producer, it is not always required and it is usually sufficient to use the OD preferred form, which is discussed here.

All products created by Open Development are covered by the Creative Commons Share-Alike Attribution license (CC BY-SA 3.0). This means that any use of these products requires attribution to Open Development, a link to the license, and an indication if any changes were made. It can be done in any reasonable manner, so long as it does not in any way suggest that Open Development endorses either the reuser or the new product. If reuser remixes, transforms, or builds on the content produced or generated by Open Development, all of these new products must be redistributed under the same license as the original.

Open Development suggests the following:

Sharing: Copying, distributing and using Open Development Mekong content.

“[Title of content produced/generated by Open Development Mekong with hyperlink]” by Open Development Mekong, licensed under CC-BY-SA.

Creating: Publishing works produced/generated from Open Development Mekong content.

This work, “[Title of your work with hyperlink here]”, is a derivative of “[Title of content produced/generated by Open Development Mekong with hyperlink]” by Open Development Mekong, used under CC-BY-SA. “[Title of your work here]” is licensed under CC-BY-SA by [Your name here].

Adapting: Publishing works modified, transformed and built upon Open Development Mekong content.

This work, “[Title of your work with hyperlink here]”, is an adaptation of “[Title of content produced/generated by Open Development Mekong with hyperlink]” by Open Development Mekong, used under CC-BY-SA. [Briefly explain the modification or transformation] “[Title of your work here]” is licensed under CC-BY-SA by [Your name here].

In circumstances where providing the hyperlinks with the above attributions is not technically feasible, you should include the plain text of the URL of the content/data on Open Development Mekong with the above notice.

For further guidance, choose an established citation format (such as APA or Chicago) and apply it consistently.

Example:

Open Development Mekong. “Hydropower.” CSV file. Accessed December 8, 2014. http://www.opendevelopmentmekong.net/hydropower.