Data License and DOIs#

version:

2023-11-01

Introduction#

Because of changing journal publisher expectations and DOI requirements, it is increasingly important for CCHDO to provide explicit guidance on the copyright (use license) statement for data in the CCHDO, and how data should be cited. The CCHDO seeks to balance scholarly credit, diverse international policy and norms, scientific progress, and tractability with the following policy.

Policy#

  1. The CCHDO strongly recommends that data submitters agree to the widely recommended Creative Commons “CC 0” license for data accessible through CCHDO. While CC0 does not legally require attribution of the data submitter, it can still be requested as a science community norm, and CCHDO will do this. This was essentially the status throughout the history of the CCHDO - there was no legal requirement to cite data in CCHDO, but rather a request and a community expectation, and information provided on the CCHDO site to credit the data submitters.

  2. When necessary, the CCHDO will accept data under a “CC BY” license which legally requires attribution. While the CCHDO can accommodate this option, and recognizes it may be necessary for certain countries/programs, it has downsides for data and is not the preferred option. If a CC BY license is requested, the submitting scientist(s) will be responsible for providing appropriate information for the citation, which will be included in the file header.

  3. A “CC BY” license can only be applied at the level of a cruise; the CCHDO cannot accommodate different licenses for different components of a cruise’s data. Similarly, the CCHDO can provide a recommended citation for the overall cruise data set, but not for components of a cruise dataset.

  4. The CCHDO data collection in aggregate would be licensed as CC0, and not require attribution of individual cruises/data submitters when used. While this seems a contradiction when the collection includes data submitted with a CC BY license (i.e., data requiring attribution), the Creative Commons license accommodates the concept of “reasonableness” in attribution, and our position is that it is not reasonable to track and cite hundreds to thousands of cruises when using the CCHDO aggregation. Using CC0 for the overall collection is critical for data to continue to flow from CCHDO into NCEI and from there into products such as the World Ocean Database, which do not support full citation credit for all data elements.

  5. Scientists publishing from data in the CCHDO’s holdings are asked to keep track of and include individual citations for the data they have used, when reasonable.

  6. Periodically, the full public CCHDO holdings will be preserved for long-term access and a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) created specific to each version. Scientists using data from the CCHDO should cite CCHDO, selecting the snapshot version which most closely matches the date of access, and using the citation information found on the version’s page.

Summary of Responsibilities for Scientists#

  • If you are submitting data to the CCHDO, you must inform the CCHDO if your data require a CC BY license; a CC 0 license will be assumed if there is no specific request. If you want the CCHDO to display a requested citation for your data (whether it is under CC BY or CC0), coordinate with other scientists submitting data from your cruise (and any other stakeholders) to define the requested citation content. Citations will only be provided at the cruise level, not for subsets of the data.

  • If you use data from the CCHDO in a publication, you will be asked to include citations for those cruises if it is a reasonable number, as well as the overall CCHDO DOI from the snapshot most closely matching your date of data access. For example, if you are looking at data across repeated occupations of one line, cite the individual cruise data sets used. If you are citing a large aggregation of data, e.g. a basin-scale study, it is sufficient to cite the CCHDO as the overall data compilation.