(5 December 2016) The Global Research Identifier Database (GRID) dataset will be made available under a CC0 license allowing users to make full use of the database releases with no need for attribution.
The CC0 license means that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse GRID data for any purposes, without restriction under copyright or database law, similar to many open source software licenses. The CC0 license removes any hurdles associated with the current license. Digital Science hopes that the open data community can benefit from using GRID, allowing seamless integrations with other open datasets and software tools.
GRID is a free, easy-to-use online database that opens up information about research organizations around the world to data scientists, developers and innovators within academic and commercial organizations. The GRID dataset addresses the problem of messy and inconsistent data on research institutions, ensuring that each entity is included correctly and only once.
Andres Mori, Data Project Lead, Digital Science said: “Discussions around the use of persistent identifiers are high on the agenda for the scholarly community. There is a clear need to bridge the gap in scholarly infrastructure with an open institutional identifier database, one that can be used as a solution to disambiguate researcher affiliations. We are certain that the open data community will benefit from the increased ease of use of GRID and that this will support their projects going forward.”
GRID now joins other Digital Science products like Figshare as a promoter of CC0 usage as the standard license for the open sharing of datasets. From January 2017, copies of the monthly GRID database release will be dedicated to the public domain and uploaded to Figshare.
The announcement in full is here.
