The ChEMBL-og

Licensing of data, and copyright is a complex thing, and always gets people hot under the collar! Some time ago, following consultation with our funders, we settled on a CC-BY-SA license for ChEMBL - this does a couple of things, but primarily it places an explicit license on the data so it is clear what you can do with it. There is a lot of hot air and active discussion over how 'public' and 'open' particular licenses are, but the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license made sense to us (for reference, this license is also used by the world's premier open resource wikipedia  - here is their license ) This license we apply to each release of the database, it makes the data freely available and usable. It requires attribution, so that users of derivative works know where the data comes from, can identify the funders and producers of the work - which we think is fair and appropriate, and finally it applies 'share-alike', so that if you distribute the ChEMBL data further yo...

Following some successful initial testing and feedback, we have opened up the Structure-based scoring component for full Open Access - please be aware that this is still be considered to be in a test phase, since the coding pixies are still tinkering away in the background. This used to be known as Strudle, which is a name we will not use externally for structure-based assessment methods - The overall name for the druggability services from the ChEMBL group at the EMBL-EBI will be known as DrugEBIlity - cool name eh? It's got EBI in there, obeys a reasonable linguistic construction (it may even be a heterograph, but I'm not sure), is an atrocious pun, and states our view that drugability has one G. Remember that there is a capital I next the the lowercase l..... The current portal allows you to search with a sequence, with a PDB code, or to upload a structure of your own. We are still establishing a reasonable capacity and farm priorities for uploaded structures, so please ...

The data content in ChEMBL is licensed under a highly permissive Creative Commons license - specifically the " CC Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license " The required attribution should contain the url of the ChEMBL resource, and also the release version, e.g. : ChEMBL data is from http://www.ebi.ac.uk/chembl - the version of ChEMBL is ChEMBL_07. This should be visible on the entry portal for a web resource in which ChEMBL is integrated, or contained with the documentation for any further distribution.

I have been thinking long and hard about the actual process for the public distribution of the ChEMBL data, and nothing is decided yet; however, I think it is likely that there will be a license for the distribution. In line with some of the existing 'free' EMBL-EBI resources, this is likely to take the form of one of the Creative Commons licenses (see http://www.creativecommons.org for more details. So as a question, what experience do people have with these licenses, as applied to public domain databases? Oh, The license we are most like to use is.....   Basically this allows redistribution and the production of derivative works, while applying conditions that attribution must be provided, and that any derivative works will be similarly shared.