Open Ethnography License

The source of this document is available at http://mcdrc.org/src/openethnography.git.

Preamble

The Open Ethnography License is designed to accommodate and encourage the sharing of digital ethnographic works in research and educational contexts.

The License enables the dissemination and re-use of copyrighted ethnographic works, on the condition that any licensed work and its derivatives must be published in an open and editable format.

The License only permits the use of works for purposes of research and study. By providing a narrowly-defined set of potential uses, the License limits uncertainty for contributors to ethnographic research projects over how documents that represent them – and that potentially include significant details of their private lives – might be used in the future. The License is not intended to preclude other uses of ethnographic works, but these uses need to be negotiated separately with creators and contributors.

Definitions

“The Work” is a copyrightable digital record or collection that is licensed under this license.

The “Source” of the Work includes all components of the Work and any custom scripts or tools that are necessary for a user to edit the Work or to build a distribution copy.1

A “distribution copy” of the Work is a version of the Work intended for dissemination to end users. It is not necessarily in an editable format.2

Permissions

Except where supplementary restrictions are indicated by the author of the Work, you are free to make use of the Work in the following ways:

  • Accessing the Work and its Source;
  • Making and storing copies of the Work and its Source;
  • Redistributing the Work and its Source by any means and in any format;
  • Producing modified versions of the Work, or new works based on the original Work.

Conditions

Your use of the Work is subject to the following conditions.

Attribution

In any verbatim copy, extract, reference, or derivative work involving use of the Work, you must provide and maintain a clear and unambiguous reference enabling users to locate:

  1. The original, unmodified Work;
  2. The copyright and acknowledgement notices pertaining to the unmodified Work, identifying all authors and contributors as applicable;3
  3. These license terms; and
  4. Any supplementary conditions specified by previous authors or contributors concerning how the Source of the Work, or any of its components, may be used.4

Research and Study

You may access, copy, distribute, or create new works from this Work only for purposes that involve or are intended to facilitate research or study, without limitation as to field of endeavour. For clarity, the term “research or study” includes but is not limited to:

  • Research for the general advancement of knowledge, including activities involved in the preparation of of a scholarly article, report, book, or thesis;
  • Research related to an applied purpose, such as policy development;
  • Activities conducted in the context of a taught course; or
  • Studying a topic out of private interest.5

Open Access

If you alter, transform, or build upon this Work in any way,6 you must make a copy of the Source of the resulting work freely accessible to the public on terms compatible with this license.7

You may charge a reasonable fee to cover the cost of reproduction and distribution of the Source, but may not prevent others from redistributing the Source for free or otherwise.

  1. The “Source” format of a work is generally the format in which the work was created, and in which it can be edited. For example, the source for an edited video would normally include all the clips and editing instructions (project files) that can be imported into a video editor. The component clips on their own would not be considered to constitute the complete Source, since additional files describing how the clips should be reassembled into a rendered video are required by an editor. It is permissible for the creator to “clean up” source files – by removing unused files or metadata that do not need to be present in the distribution version – prior to their distribution. To satisfy the requirements of this license, works normally need to be prepared in an openly documented format for which free editing tools are available. Tools used in preparing a work are not generally considered part of its source, unless they are customized tools or software scripts that are specific to that project. For example, the word processor used to prepare a text document is not considered part of the source for that document, but a macro script that interacts with a database to update fields in that document would be. [return]
  2. In some instances the Source and Distribution formats for a work may be the same – for example, in the case of a text document prepared and distributed in the OpenDocument word processing format, or an unmodified image or video clip in the format produced by the digital camera. But often it may be desirable to distribute works in one or more derivative formats – such as a PDF or epub version of a text, or a lower-resolution version of a video clip for viewing on the web. In cases where derivative formats are used for distribution, the license requires that the work also be released in its Source format. [return]
  3. The license requires that acknowledgement notices be maintained. This may be criticized as a cumbersome requirement – similar to the invariant sections that might accumulate in a GNU Free Documentation License (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), a major problem leading to the deprecation of this license by Debian and Wikimedia Foundation projects (“General Resolution: Why the GNU Free Documentation License is not suitable for Debian main”, Debian Project, 2006, https://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_001; “Licensing update”, Wikimedia Foundation, 2009, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update). Nonetheless, maintaining such notices is essential from an ethical and practical point of view in social science research, as researchers are often required to acknowledge sources of funding for their research, and it is desirable that such acknowledgements be maintained in any substantive derivative uses of sponsored material. Such notices should be maintained verbatim. [return]
  4. The License accommodates “supplementary restrictions” applicable to the source material used in an ethnographic work. These restrictions obviously need to remain in the spirit of the License itself, but are intended to address the reality that source material may come from a range of different places, and subject to different conditions. First, some ethnographic projects may incorporate third-party copyrighted material, used under a more restrictive license – such as a photograph or map included in a book, used with permission from the original copyright holder. Projects such as Wikipedia do not allow the incorporation of such material, but for ethnographic and historical research, commenting on “non-open” work is sometimes inevitable. It should be permissible to license works incorporating such copyrighted material, with the provision that derivative works may not include the copyrighted components unless additional permissions have been secured. Second, creators may wish to include specific notes regarding the use of Source elements in the interests of protecting some participants’ privacy or other rights. For example, raw interview recordings may include sensitive comments that an interviewee does not wish to be quoted directly in a publish work – but the interviewee may still consent to the interview being archived and made available to other researchers. In these cases it may be desirable to ensure that the source interview used in preparing a monograph be made available as part of the Source of that monograph, with these supplementary conditions attached. [return]
  5. The “research and study” provision is intended to offer compatibility with informed consent processes. People who agree to participate in an ethnographic research project will typically be asked to consent to some information concerning their personal lives being used in the context of a specific research project. While it is reasonable to expect that participants will understand the implications of such permission being extended to future research and teaching, asking for blanket use permission – as with a Creative Commons license, for instance – would create a situation where the ethnographic records could eventually be used in ways to which the participant might not wish to agree, but had not thought of. [return]
  6. The “Open Access” clause requires users to share sources even if they are modifying the work for private purposes. This is not enforceable at the individual level, but we want to ensure that people still share teaching resources, for instance, that are made within a seminar. [return]
  7. Derivative works created using a licensed work may be distributed under any terms that are compatible with this license. Where elements of an ethnographic work or collection covered by this license are incorporated into a compilation work, those elements continue to be covered by this license. [return]