Licence and authorship of contributions

How the texts are licensed

Text contributions published on these pages are released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Anyone may reuse, redistribute and modify them, including commercially, on one condition: credit the author. It is the licence the academic world recognises without argument, and it is chosen deliberately because it does not obstruct the use we want to make easy — a paragraph written here ending up, duly credited, in a funding application or a paper.

We rejected the share-alike variant for exactly that reason: it would have imposed the licence on every derived document, and no research office signs that off happily.

The name stays attached to the text

Attribution is per section, not per page. Each section carries the name of whoever wrote its published version.

When a section is replaced by an approved proposal, the previous version does not disappear: it stays in the history, with the signature of whoever wrote it and the dates of publication and replacement. Nobody loses authorship of what they wrote, even once the text is superseded.

At the foot of each page is the list of everyone who contributed to it, historical versions included.

How a contribution gets published

Participants do not edit published text directly. They write a proposal, which waits until an editor reviews it.

Approved, the proposal becomes the published text and carries its writer's name. Rejected, it leaves no trace on the public site.

One rule cannot be worked around: nobody approves their own proposal. An editor who writes must wait for another editor to review it. Without that constraint, review would be decorative.

The distinction that matters

A signature on these pages is not a byline on a scientific publication. They are different things with different rules, and conflating them causes real disputes.

Whoever writes a section here is entitled to their name here. Authorship on any resulting paper follows the discipline's criteria — substantial contribution to design, collection or interpretation, plus approval of the final text — and is decided by the scientific lead.

We state this up front, and in the registration form, because expecting the second on the strength of the first is the quickest way to wreck a collaboration.

Withdrawing a contribution

You may ask at any time for your name to be removed from a section, or for a contribution of yours to be taken down.

Requests go to an administrator. It should be said plainly what CC BY implies: anyone who has already reused the text elsewhere, having credited the author as required, is not obliged to withdraw it. Withdrawal applies to these pages, not to anyone else's past.

The software

Bruna, the platform this site runs on, is software and carries its own licence: AGPL v3.

Anyone using it may modify it; anyone offering it as a service must make their modifications available. A choice consistent with a project that asks for open data and reproducible methods.