Mike, my concern is precisely that there are too many licences and most of them are totally incompatible. Thus you will struggle to find any two datasets in the most recent NAR database issue where you can legally combine the data. My personal belief is that the only way you can avoid this is by removing all legal conditions of use and essentially asking the users to “play niceâ€. And this already works pretty well in the sciences. You don't need a licence to force people to cite properly, you have a community that self-polices.

The other argument is that what I am looking for is a simple set of rules that we can sell to funding agencies as a protocol that they can sign up to and impose on funded researchers. So a single straightforward approach is desirable both for clarity and interoperability.

But as Heather Morrison pointed out in a recent email to the list (link above) we do need to take some time to look at all the options anyway. This was the point I got to at the end of my series of posts on the state of Open Science. That now is the time to look at what people are doing and what is working - to aggregate best practice and then try to pull something together out of that. The current debate is useful in getting the issues out and worked over though.