Opening up the data – an update to BioMed Central’s Copyright and License Agreement

August 21

The Creative Commons CC0 waiver will become part of the BioMed Central Copyright and License Agreement on Tuesday 3rd September. For articles submitted from this date, CC0 will apply to data in all articles published by BioMed Central or Chemistry Central journals.

So what do we mean by open data, what does the Creative Commons CC0 waiver cover, and why this is of interest to you?

Open data relates to the fact that the open communication of scientific research involves more than just the final results of research being published in an article in an open access journal. Sharing the underlying data is an increasingly important part of the research and publication process. BioMed Central aims to provide leadership in supporting scientific communities in the sharing of underlying scientific data, publishing it in standard formats, and supporting re-use and further analysis, which helps facilitate the discovery of new knowledge.

Our updated Copyright and License Agreement will mean that the Creative Commons CC0 waiver applies to data (e.g. in tables and additional files, graphical data points, and bibliographic data). CC0 is data-specific, and the Creative Commons attribution license (CC-BY) will continue to apply generally to articles published in BioMed Central journals.

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Licensing the future: report on BioMed Central’s public consultation on open data in peer-reviewed journals | BMC Research Notes 2013, 6:318 | doi:10.1186/1756-0500-6-318