Panton Principles

PD Image
Data sharing provides fertile ground for derivative work: Once some data were released into the Public Domain, any reuse or modifications are permitted. With legal claims to the source being waved to the maximal extent possible, community norms are invoked for usage guidance, the most essential ones within the scientific community being proper attribution as well as documentation of any further processing. This image is based on the original photo of the drafters of the Panton Principles in front of the Panton Arms pub and was obtained by means of this transformation.

The Panton Principles (sometimes abbreviated as PP) are recommendations for scientists on a simple standard notification to be attached to scientific data that are released to the public. The notification states, in effect, that other scientists can use the data without infringing copyrights. The idea is to promote sharing of scientific data, with the implied hope to accelerate and improve scientific research. The Panton Principles name is derived from the Panton Arms pub in Cambridge, UK, which was the location where the principles were originally drafted.

Background

Large and ever increasing amounts of scientific data are generated in the framework of scientific research projects, and scientific data in this narrow sense are the target of the Panton principles (in a wider sense, basically any piece of information can become scientific data in an appropriately framed research project, independent of the originator of the information). No clear standards exist, however, for how to label data for reuse, and this is the gap that the Panton Principles are meant to fill.