Additions to the 'open_licenses' list

[wose]

I was wondering why there are only CC licenses in the list which determines if a work is open access in the front end. While CC licenses are typically referenced as good open access licenses, there are more which fulfill open access requirements. For software works CC licenses are not the best fit and licenses like GNU GPL and MIT are used when the author cares about it being free and open.

Would you be open to pull requests adding licenses to this list? If so, should those be one PR for each license?

[digitaldogsbody]

Hi Sebastian,

Thanks for the ticket :) Are you asking about the presentation of works in DataCite Commons or in the JSON API response (or both)?

It's possible to use other licenses in the DataCite Metadata Schema (see https://datacite-metadata-schema.readthedocs.io/en/4.6/properties/rights/ for details), so a change to presentation would have to be considered using the DataCite Suggestions workflow.

There's a guide for how to submit suggestions available here: datacite/datacite-suggestions#67, if you are happy to open a discussion there, then the appropriate people within DataCite can get the process moving.

Cheers,
Mike

[wose]

Hi Mike,

Are you asking about the presentation of works in DataCite Commons or in the JSON API response (or both)?

I think it's mainly the API response from lupo, akita uses it as is to calculate some additional metrics for the 'Person' view and has to trust/use the values lupo provides.

Here's an example:

This persons works are licensed CC-BY and GPL but the displayed Accessibility Achievements suggest that not all works are open access. I think one can hardly make an argument that the GPL is not an open access license. The creative commons organisation even recommends using licenses from the free software foundation (like the GPL) for software projects since they do not recommend using CC licenses for such works (CC FAQ).

I was curious and searched for the code which decides which licenses are OA. First in the frontend, and I discovered some other metrics which are based on an API call to lupo:

Person.tsx#L40:

...
  const open_license_count = person.totalWorks.totalOpenLicenses

  const is_open_hero = open_license_count == person.totalWorks.totalCount && person.totalWorks.totalCount > 0
  const is_open_license = open_license_count > 0
  const is_os_triathlete = has_open_access_software && has_open_access_paper && has_open_access_dataset
  const is_open_access = person.totalWorks.totalContentUrl > 0

  const percentage_open_license = Math.round((open_license_count / person.totalWorks.totalCount) * 100)
  const percentage_open_url = Math.round((person.totalWorks.totalContentUrl / person.totalWorks.totalCount) * 100)
...

I then followed the API call into lupo and found the corresponding aggregate filter which had a list of license ids which are considered OA by lupo.

doi.rb#L680

...
      open_licenses: {
        filter: { terms: {
          "rights_list.rightsIdentifier": [
            "cc-by-1.0",
            "cc-by-2.0",
            "cc-by-2.5",
            "cc-by-3.0",
            "cc-by-3.0-at",
            "cc-by-3.0-us",
            "cc-by-4.0",
            "cc-pddc",
            "cc0-1.0",
            "cc-pdm-1.0"
          ]
...

Then I opened the issue ;-)
I'm happy to use the suggestion workflow if that's the right thing to do.