ROAR-NET Copyright and Licensing Policy
This document is based upon work from COST Action Randomised Optimisation Algorithms Research Network (ROAR-NET), CA22137, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).
Scope
This proposal concerns materials that are:
- Created, remixed, or adapted in the context of this COST Action and its goals
- Made publicly available on the ROAR-NET software, data or document repositories
- Subject to copyright
This includes, but is not limited to, the following materials outlined in the Memorandum of Understanding:
- Documentation and software source code for the problem modelling frameworks developed
- Libraries of problem statements, problem instances, and modelling examples
- Materials for Training Schools, Code Fests and Competitions
Principles
In order to drive adoption of the proposed software solutions, ideas, and materials produced in the context of ROAR-NET as much as possible without loss of proper attribution, the proposed licences take into account the following guiding principles:
- The work should be available free of access charges or other barriers
- The licences should not restrict how the work is used. In particular, both non-commercial and commercial uses should be permitted
- The licences should allow for remixing, adapting, and creating derived works, possibly under different terms
- The licences should require attribution to the creators of the work
Copyright
Copyright of the works made available on the ROAR-NET repositories shall be retained by authors, creators, their institutions, or other rights holders, as applicable.
Source code
Software source code shall be made available under the Apache License Version 2.0 (Apache-2.0, https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html). This licence fulfils all of the guiding principles and has patent-grant clauses that protect contributors and users from patent litigation that might arise from bad faith contributions.
Furthermore, Apache-2.0 is adopted by many well-known open-source projects and should be well understood by legal departments of prospective users and contributors.
Other materials
Other materials, such as text, figures, videos, and music, shall be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY-4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This licence fulfils all the guiding principles, is well known, and should be well understood by legal departments.
While original work should be placed under the CC-BY-4.0 licence, the reuse of existing works already published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY-SA-4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) shall also be accepted as long as such licensing is restricted to those works. The CC-BY-SA-4.0 licence does not fully fulfil principle 3 since it requires that derivative works are shared under the same licence. However, this licence allows for a collective work to be made available under a different licence, thus allowing the reuse of such existing works to the benefit of the Action without detriment to the guiding principles.
Furthermore, to allow for easier use and adaptations of the work according to the above principles, supporting source code for these materials shall be made available whenever possible. Examples include LaTeX source code of documents and presentations, source code and data required to produce figures and reproduce statistical analyses, and source code used to generate problem instances. Such supporting source code shall be made available under the Apache-2.0 licence for the reasons described above whenever possible. However, to promote openness, and since such supporting source code is considered supplementary, other licences may be adopted for supporting source code if required.
Compliance review
The maintainers of the software, data, and document repositories of the COST Action, as mandated by the Action Management Committee, shall be responsible for reviewing the correct use of licences as described above.
Other licences
Decisions on the adoption of other licences not covered by this text shall be deferred to the Management Committee.
