[Cod-bugs] Questions about COD

[Saulius Gražulis]

Dear Marie-Emilia,

thank your for your inquiry about the COD! Below I will attempt to
answer your questions.

On 2023-01-31 18:08, HERBET Marie-Emilia wrote:
> Could you please tell me what is COD’s main supervising institution? 

Currently the hosting institution is Vilnius University, Life Sciences
Center, Institute of Biotechnology.

The COD scientific contents is supervised by the international COD
Advisory Board (COD AB) whose members are listed on the COD Web site.

> I saw that the repository received donations from several
> organisations but I don’t quite understand what is its founding
> institution.

The COD is founded by scientists who constituted its first Advisory
Board, as a "grass-root" movement. It was hosted at the Le Mans
University at that time. It is funded by various means – research grants
to it's development and applications, donations by companies that use
it, donations of individuals and support of research organisations such
as universities.

The founders of the COD are physical persons, however – scientists who
overview and invest their time into the COD development. It is regarded
that for the project of this type, no "founding institution" can be
identified, or is actually necessary.

> Second point, where is the data hosting service based
>
The data are currently hosted in the Vilnius University Data Center,
supported by the Vilnius University.
>
> and what is the long-term preservation policy of the repository?
>
The policy is to preserve the COD data for as long as it is need for the
community and valuable for science. The projected life span is decades,
depending on the developments of the crystallography.

All COD history is recorded in the Subversion repository, allowing to
trace all changes to the database that were done over the time, ensuring
full data provenance.

> Finally, I would like to know why COD opted for CC0 license instead of
> CCBY?
>
The Advisory Board and the founders of the database (Armel Le Bail,
Daniel Chateigner) was strongly insisting that crystallographic data
should be as open as possible, thus putting their collections of data
under the "public domain" designation. Since "public domain" is not a
legal license in Europe, it was eventually voted by the COD AB that CC0
should be adopted.
>
> The public domain license might deter some researchers from depositing
> their structures as this license does not require to cite the authors
> when reusing their structures.
>
I think there is some misunderstanding here.

Facts of nature, as we all know, are not copyrightable (i.e. everyone
has an unrestricted right to post a statement that "NaCl unit cell
length a is 5.640 Å" and similar facts, encoded in whatever form they
like). The license therefore does not apply, and can not apply, to the
information in the individual records. Only the database as a whole is
copyrighted, and licensed under CC0 by its creators under sui generis
"sweat of the brow" doctrine of the current copyright law.

Citing the individual records, or the database itself when they are used
in research is an accepted good practice of scientific scholarship. It
is therefore independent, in my view, from the license under which the
database is distributed. When researchers use individual papers or the
database as a whole, they cite the relevant papers to provide
information for their readers and to give credit to information sources.
This alone should ensure that the antecedent work is properly cited.

Hope this helps,

Saulius

-- 
Dr. Saulius Gražulis
Vilnius University Institute of Biotechnology, Saulėtekio al. 7
LT-10257 Vilnius, Lietuva (Lithuania)
fax: (+370-5)-2234367 / phone (office): (+370-5)-2234353
mobile: (+370-684)-49802, (+370-614)-36366

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