License?

[kjemist]

Hello,

I was wondering if you were planning to add some sort of open license (such as a Creative Commons license) to your datasets to enable reuse of your datasets?

[kjemist]

I see you have this section: https://github.com/owid#can-i-use-or-reproduce-your-code-or-data, but it might be an idea to actually add the license files in the relevant repositories as well?

[marcelgerber]

Hi, yes that is a good point.

In general, we try to make citation information readily available. In our interactive charts you can always click on "Learn more about this data" to get information about the sources, and often times there's also information on how to cite them.

Sadly, we cannot hand out a plain Creative Commons license, since the licensing depends heavily on the data publisher behind it, and we are usually just republishing the data (with slight modifications at times, and normalized into our data format).

In this repository that information is less readily available, sadly, but you can still find some source information in the datapackage.json file that is available with every dataset in this repo.

Also, be aware that there are the repos https://github.com/owid/co2-data and https://github.com/owid/energy-data with more broad data on these two topics, if that helps.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

[kjemist]

Thank you for your reply.
So then the question remains - if I want to reuse some of your content, while including your data - can I really license that under a creative commons license?

To explain what I mean:
I am planning to plot some of the data which you have obtained from the CDC. If I dsitribute the code which plots this data under an open license, can I then

• a) include a copy of the dataset I obtained from your repo or do I need to
• b) include a link in the code which retrieves the data from your repo (like this)
  If neither of these are possible, do I then have to resort to
• c) explain where the data was obtained from, but not include any direct pointer to this data was obtained from except for a general link to your GitHub repo?

[marcelgerber]

Hello again, and sorry for the late response.

In this particular instance, the original source of this data is a pdf report that can be found on CDC Stacks here.

CDC Stacks writes that many of its articles are available under a Creative Commons or similar license, but sadly it doesn't say anything specifically for this article.
To be certain, it is probably best to contact either the CDC or the National Center for Health Statistics about the exact licensing terms for this report.