It’s great to see lots of publications in Precedings being released under a Creative Commons license, however I’ve noticed some inconsistencies which I think should be rectified.

On the “Document information” pages, the license information states ”This publication is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution License” … this is a little unclear as to exactly which license applies, since there are multiple versions of this license (eg versions 1.0, 2.0, 2.5 and 3.0). Since the information on copyright terms links to the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/), I assume it is intended to be the Attribution 2.5 license. Maybe the license information should instead read ”This publication is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License”, and also contain a direct link to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ (maybe with the appropriate CC license ‘icon’ ?)

It is also wonderful to see that CC license metadata has been included in the XHTML source for the Precedings “Document information” pages. Unfortunately, there seems to be some inconsistency here, since in the page head element there is the tag meta name=”DC.Rights” content=”Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License” , while later in the code, after the DOI info there is some RDF cc:License rdf:about=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/” . Notice that one refers to a version 2.5 license, the other a version 2.0 license. I’m not sure if these are compatible licenses or not, but ideally this could be harmonised to use just one license.

A few other notes, while I’m on a roll.

The more recent Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license is available .. why not use it ? As far as I know, there is now an ‘unported’ version which contains language used in international intellectual property treaties (rather than language specific to US copyright law), making these licenses more generally applicable for an international userbase.

Also, it would be great to be able to search by license in the “Advanced search” on Precedings.

(PS: IANAL)