I really appreciate that iNaturalist respects observers & photographers’ ability to choose how a photo is shared, however it seems to me that there should be more incentive than simply altruism for users to make their media and observations open and available for scientific use, if not for advancing science, at least for conservation of communal resources. Has iNat ever considered adapting the Flickr strategy, with a limit on non-licensed photos? Back in 2018, the company announced that it would limit users on free accounts to 1000 photos. Later, the company exempted photos licensed under various Creative Commons licenses from the 1000 photo limit (above which, photos risked deletion). I feel that this could be a relevant model for iNaturalist: set a finite limit for media that is All Rights Reserved, but no inherent limit for Creative Commons licensed media. I’m not sure what the right limits would be, but perhaps 250 observations where the media is ARR. Perhaps a higher limit might apply to select professional photographers. That would encourage users to consider the value of their photos or sounds and whether they have genuine justification to not permit re-use of the media.
As a second aspect to encouraging Creative Commons licensing, would it be possible to have a dual-licensing option? The case I have in mind would be an option to simultaneously apply both CC BY SA and CC BY NC to a particular work, thereby allowing others to choose which license applies to their application of the media. Again, that would be a good way to incrementally open things up without requiring users to choose between GBIF or Wikipedia (and related projects) and CC BY.
If other license combos were permitted (there’s a very finite number of combinations), being able to apply multiple licenses might be a way to address attempted revocations of permissive licenses and limits of the CC BY-NC license as a minimum for GBIF inclusion.