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Today, BioMed Central announced that they will require authors to make all data associated with published articles available under a Creative Commons CC0 waiver. This is great news, as it places more biomedical data in the public domain, helping others to reuse data from peer-reviewed papers more efficiently. It’s the same legal tool that our authors use on data included with F1000Research papers. With CC0 any scientist can reuse and combine published data from many sources – without potentially having their research, such as large scale meta-analyses, restricted by legal barriers. BioMed Central’s decision was based on a public consultation, carried out in late 2012, which found that respondents were in favour of changing the copyright system in journal publishing. A Publishing Open Data Working Group, of which F1000Research is also a member,  previously recommended adopting CC0 for published data, which is exactly what we did when we launched.

The CC-BY license on articles, recommended by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, allows for easy re-use of information, but requires that the original authors are credited. This ensures that information is freely available, while protecting the authors’ creative output – the interpretation of data, the written manuscript, the original thoughts putting the data in a broader context.  Combined with a CC0 waiver for the data itself, this is increasingly believed to be the best approach to license content in open access journals.

A newly-published article  in BMC Research Notes, co-written by current F1000 Outreach Director Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, summarizes the result of the public consultation, and answers many questions that came up during this consultation, such “Will articles receive fewer citations?” and “Will patient privacy be put at risk?”

If you have more specific questions about data licensing at F1000Research, take a look at the last section of our FAQ, or this blog post.