Licensing problem for paper using iNat data

[ajwright]

I’m pondering these issues myself, but for systematics work. I’m not at the stage where I have solutions to offer but I figured there are a few extra considerations that might be worth mentioning.

@deboas

Why is that? Non Research Grade observations? You and your co-authors should be able to fix that by adding correct IDs, and within a short time, those observations will be synced with GBIF.

This may be neither feasible or desirable. Not feasible in the sense that if an observation represents a new taxon or an ambiguity within current taxonomy, it’s likely to divide community opinion. Not desirable in that, especially in the case of a new taxon, it could be seen as disingenuous (explicitly not bringing up academic ethics or community standards here) to add an ID we know is incorrect just to shunt it to Research Grade (to say nothing of multiple coordinated accounts adding IDs approximating sock/meat puppet problems I recall from 6-7 years ago); additionally, using circumscriptions of existing taxa different than those in iNat’s standard references before a justification appears in print seems to me pointlessly contrarian, except in especially clear-cut cases. Furthermore, once a new taxon is published, it may be slow to filter into iNat’s standard references or be overtly disagreed with by the custodians of those references.

@sjl197

then why not stupidly simple like a list of URLs in a spreadsheet?

I think this also brings up questions of what qualifies as a derivative work in this instance. I could see adding a new taxonomic determination or phenology classification, but what about rounding coordinates or converting date to month bins or day of year?

@deboas

This is contradicted by the fact that media and observation data on iNat have separate licenses.

What about annotations? I don’t see a license for those in Settings. For my own phenology work I’m going through every data point individually and reclassifying phenology, but I could see this being an issue for large scale ecological research relying on scoring that has been crowdsourced on-platform.

@deboas

It kind of is, in that there doesn’t seem to be a clear reason why all observation data should not be CC0 by default.

@jdmore

Unfortunately that doesn’t address the issue of the fungibility (word?) of iNat observations. The owner of an observation can come in at any time after the researcher accessed it and edit or even delete it. To maintain scientific repeatability and falsifiability, researchers really do need to archive the snapshot of the data on which they based their analysis.

I think this is the crux of the issue. iNat isn’t set up to be a scientific archive - a point I have made before at lab meetings etc. Academic norms do not necessarily apply. I don’t know enough or have desire to pontificate on the issue, but it seems to me that there’s a push and pull between the community and individual-focused model and research utility. Maybe this, or this plus enforced (or default-nudged) CC0 on metadata, is as close as it gets. Certainly there’s an irony in citizen science being less readily citable/accessible for formal work. I’ve seen suggestions and heard talk that iNat can replace herbaria for some/many functions, which scares me both in terms of data quality and in funding streams for natural history collections.

I think my preferred solution is to make data as derivative as possible, and hope that I or someone else will have the time and permits to repeat interesting observations with specimens. Fingers crossed for when it comes time to submit.