Hi everybody, this is my first post in this forum… apologies for any inconvenience.
I come with a question that seems to me rather simple, but still I could not find an answer in other threads or in iNaturalist FAQ.
Given an “all rights reserved” record available only in iNaturalist, can I cite in an academic paper it/its existence, or the fact that I know of its existence, obviously providing the correct reference?
And if so, which of the examples at the bottom would be appropriate?
Please don’t suggest me to contact the author: the question is about the general availability of records (and for cases when authors do not answer).
If your answer is “non citable”, I ask:
then, what is the difference with ordinary citing any other coyrighted work (i.e., papers or books published by scientific publishers)?
If I write a paper on the distribution of that species, do I have to act as if that record was to me unknown? Practically, am I asked to declare false information?
thanks everybody in advance.
Examples: #1 “A single record for this species is also known for Trentino region ([Reference])” #2 “A single record for this species is also known for Trentino region, where it was observed in Siror on 10 july 2024 ([Reference])” #3 "[Within a list of examined/available records]: “Trentino region, locality: Siror, 10 july 2024 ([Reference])” #4 [Any of #1-3, plus putting the corresponding dot in a map] #5 [Any of #1-3, plus omitting the corresponding dot in a map, and adding to the caption “record provided by [Reference] omitted as copyrighted”]
I would think using info from an observation for research would be covered by fair use. Also, ideas and information are not copyrightable, as far as I know. At least in the US, facts are not copyrightable. I’m honestly not sure what exactly is covered by observation licenses other than the text in addition to pictures (which have their own licenses). The copyright on data is for how they are presented, and when citing someone else’s ideas/fact collection in a paper you would paraphrase and add the citation/reference to give credit to the origin (not giving credit would be plagiarism, not necessarily copyright infringement). So I don’t see an issue with adding a data point based on an “all rights reserved” observation on iNaturalist as long as credit is given and you are not copying the pictures or any description text verbatim into your paper. From an observer standpoint, I’d love to know if my observations were used for a scientific study of some sort but mine all have CC licenses and many got into GBIF so they might be used already.
It is possible to cite anything, no matter the copyright status. “A citation allows authors to provide the source of any quotations, ideas, and information that they include in their own work based on the copyrighted works of other authors.” Otherwise academics would have a real problem writing anything without sending a thousand emails because usually papers and books have ‘all rights reserved’ as well. It only becomes an issue if you don’t cite properly where you risk plagiarising the original.
According to Wikipedia, ‘all rights reserved’ “indicates that the copyright holder reserves, or holds for their own use, all the rights provided by copyright law, such as distribution, performance, and creation of derivative works”. An academic paper would not fall under any of these categories.
What you may not do, of course, is use any of the images without permission.
In any case, if you haven’t done so already, it doesn’t hurt to ask the observer. I bet they’ll probably be excited about their observation making it into a paper if anything. ^^
The records should be citeable, just as any other fact in a copyrighted publication would be, eg “Solenopsis invicta has recently been reported from Maryland” could be included in the paper along with the appropriate citation, you just cannot reproduce the image without permission of the photographer. So if the paper is citing the records that is fine, as long as the paper doesn’t include the image
I continue to believe that it should not be possible to copyright an observation. Photo or sound, yes, even the text in the “Notes” field, ok, but the facts of the observation, no. What is the possible use case for sharing an observation on a platform like iNaturalist, and copyrighting it?
To the original question, any of 1-4 seem fine, but the name of the observer should be included in any of 1-3 for attribution. I assume this would appear as part of the Reference, but just to be clear.
I’m not a lawyer, but I think the law is pretty clear here (at least in Canada and US which is what I’m familiar with). A basic fact like “[observer] saw [species] at [location] on [date]” does not contain any information/content protected by copyright and can be reproduced without any legal issues. No citation is legally required (and citation is generally irrelevant for copyright law). This is distinct from Fair Use, which allows use of copyrighted material under certain conditions. In some cases/jurisdictions there ARE protections for things like databases, in that it might be illegal to reproduce a substantial portion of a database without permission. But this would not apply to reproducing individual records, and in any case that copyright would belong to iNat, not to the observer.
How you cite is entirely a matter of journal policy and scientific conventions, I don’t believe there are any legal considerations whatsoever.
Do you know this page? There are informations about citing records there, you might fiind it useful. https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000170344-how-should-i-cite-inaturalist-
I think that it is important, among other things, to mention in the paper both a person who made observation and the identifier(s). Even if it’s not legally required (I don’t know about that), they contributed to that record and should be acknowledged.
Ah, and I think that copyrights which you can see in observations apply not exactly to the observations but to the photos attached to them.
One would think so, but each observer can select three separate types of license - for the observation itself, for photos, and for audio (see Account Settings - Content & Display - Licensing). This causes considerable confusion.
I agree it’s a good practice to acknowledge identifiers, as in many cases their contribution to unusual records is essential.
Thanks eyekosaeder, the page you linked was particularly useful, especially this sentence "Citation legally protects an author who wants to refer to someone else’s work and to avoid plagiarism and copyright infringement."
In general, I agree with the common sentiment expressed by answers: copyright has an obvious sense when applied to photos, videos, text, etc…
The sense is much less clear when it is applied to the whole faunistic record, not just to the media.
But as iNaturalist allows to do so, I also wonder: what would be an example of copyright infringement of a record?
I see that copyrighted records cannot be transferred to other platforms (such as GBIF), but this takes me to the quite weird conclusion that such a denial of sharing:
give no evident advantage to the author (none that I can think of, at least…)
at most, give advantages to iNaturalist, as unique holder of records
damage the whole scientific community
Maybe I am missing something fundamental… if so, please share your ideas.
The license allows the observer to claim copyright over their observation, but whether this is legally enforceable, or whether they would ever attempt to enforce it, is very much open/doubtful. I think if you were to cite with a link without republishing any data as in your option 1, there is no possible problem. If you were to republish specific info from the observation, conceivably there could be an issue, BUT, as others have noted, in most (all?) jurisdictions, enforcing copyright of basic facts isn’t allowed. So as long as you would cite the authors/observers, the claim of copyright is likely unenforceable.
As other threads have noted, it might be possible to claim some sort of copyright on the notes/description of an observation, as the text there is a creative output of some kind at least. But other than that, I can’t think of a way that copyright could apply to most of an observation (excluding the media) as it is fact-based.
The main practical issue with using copyrighted observations is that they don’t go into GBIF, so they can’t easily be cited with a single doi that way. But I think as long as the copyrighted observations are cited appropriately, using the factual data in those observations is likely ok.
On a more practical note, I know of no instance in which someone has ever attempted to enforce a claim of copyright on observation data.
It should be completely fine to cite the observation; just use whatever standard you’d use for any online source. In order to quote notes in their entirety or reprint the image or record, you should get the permission of the observer. You could probably make a case for fair use, but if you’re able to just get permission that makes it uncomplicatedly ok.
(Source: am an academic librarian, though extremely not a copyright lawyer)
As others have said, it is seriously doubtful whether an observation itself is copyrightable at all. And, as you say, even if it were copyrightable, it seems difficult to imagine how one even could violate it in a way that would not be de minimis. The closest scenario i can imagine is if, say, you made a bunch of your own observations and then I went through and made a bunch of identical copycat medialess observations that I had actually not seen, possibly that could be construed as a copyright violation… It would also get me suspended for the completely different reason of being a clear violation of the community guideline
Add accurate content and take community feedback into account. Any account that adds content we believe decreases the accuracy of iNaturalist data may be suspended, particularly if that account behaves like a machine, e.g. adds a lot of content very quickly and does not respond to comments and messages.
and that violation would exist whether you marked the observation copyrighted or not, so the core issue is still not a copyright violation.
Regardless, being copyrighted or not has no affect on your ability to cite things.
I appreciate your good and accurate response - as a photographer and amateur copyright expert I get extremely frustrated by folks who don’t understand these things sounding off like experts!
Some researchers want to keep tight control of their data, especially before it is published in a peer-reviewed journal or whatever, but in that case why would they be posting the data to iNat?
Not clear what comments here you are taking objection to since they mostly all say essentially the same thing, but here is a more detailed explanation i wrote a while ago with a citation for why observations likely aren’t copyrightable at least in the US.
This topic has also come up multiple times before, and multiple staff members have admitted on the forum that observations themselves probably aren’t copyrightable in the US. For practical purposes the option to apply a license to an observation is basically just a ‘do/do not export to GBIF’ selection box; honestly, it would be clearer to have the box just say that directly, instead of confusing people with license choices that are not meaningful.
It is worth remembering that different countries have different copyright laws, so one size may not fit all.
It would be an interestingly extreme case if someone wanted to use every iNaturalist record of Mallards, for example, to map their global distribution. I suppose you would just cite iNaturalist as a whole (another option might be to submit a supplemental data file citing each observation to an on-line journal). A conversation with the journal editors concerning their policy would be appropriate.
I think the reason GBIF doesn’t accept copyrighted observations is because they take the information (including any text the observer wrote in the description) and copy that information into their database. They’re not citing the observation–they’re copying it. Two very different things. It’s the difference between copying words in a book and putting it on your website and citing that book on your website. As others have said, you can cite anything regardless of whether it’s copyrighted.
The problem I had recently is that I wanted to include a bundle of observations as a GBIF download and cite that download (rather than compile a bunch of iNat URLs)–this is the recommended approach. But some observations weren’t in GBIF b/c of the copyright issue. I asked them to kindly change the copyright (and explained why) and everyone that responded (which was most) gladly did so (and they didn’t know about the copyright issue). It was a lot of work on my part–and took a couple of months before I got the 6 observations included in GBIF so I could cite the download.
I realise this is straying from the original topic, but that seems to have been well answered, and moderators can split this off as a new topic if need be. Why can’t GBIF have a second flow to just take the basic facts from copyright observations? It doesn’t seem that would cause any legal issues, and they could still link back to the original for anyone interesting in reading observation notes etc.