Registry license terms

The Registry is considering dropping the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share-alike sharealike] term from the [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Creative Commons-Attribution-Sharealike] license that we have been using for the past few years. This change is important because it will make Registry content compatible with important biological sequence databases, such as NCBI's [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/ Genbank]. That means we'll be able to submit our sequences to Genbank and thereby take advantage of many useful NCBI tools.

What does it mean to remove the sharealike term from the Registry license? Previously, content submitted to the Registry could be reused and modified by anyone and they would need to give you, the author of the content, attribution in their modified work and also their modified work would need to be shared under similar terms. Without the sharealike term, someone who takes your content from the Registry and modifies or builds upon it would still have to give you attribution for your work but could choose to share their modified work in whatever manner they please. The new license we are proposing to use is the [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Creative Commons-Attribution license].

We are soliciting comments from the community prior to making this change. Please email us or edit the discussion for this page.