[vtkusers] [query] good venue for publishing a dataset?

Sat Feb 11 11:13:55 EST 2006

Hi Will,

We are very happy to hear about your willingness
to disseminate the data that you acquired in your
research project.

The world will be a better place if more researchers
shared your attitude and support for Open Access to
scientific information, whether it is in the form of
data, source code, parameters or papers.

The first thing that you should consider when releasing
data is the licensing that you want to use for it. Note
that you or your institution are the copyright holders
of the data. In order to make your data sharable (at least
under US copyright laws), you should choose one of the two
following options:

1) Release it on the "public domain" and renounce
    to your copyright.

    or

2) Retain your copyright and release the data with a
    license for a specific set of uses.

Option (1) is certainly the simplest way to go, but it may
imply that you will not even get credits for giving your
data away. Note that the term "public domain" has a specific
legal meaning.

Option (2) is the most commonly used, and then the question
is:

            What license to use  ?

One of the widespread licenses for data is the

        "Creative Commons Attribution License"
     http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

This license states that you (or your institution) retain
the copyright of the data, but you give permission to anybody
to copy your data, and to create derivative work from it.
(e.g. segment the data and distribute the segmentation), for
free (gratis). With the only condition that they will give
credit to you (or your institution).

This license is the one used by most of the Open Access Journals,
including the prestigious Public Library of Science (PLoS) and
BiomedCentral.

Once you have selected a license, you can distribute your data
in different databases. Note that the great advantage of the
Creative Commons Attribution License is that you retain the
copyright of your data. Therefore you are still the ultimate
authority deciding what can and what cannot be done with the
data. For example, you can submit your data to multiple databases.

This is in contrast with the voracious practice of most publishers,
that require you to "transfer" your copyright to them, and therefore
renounce to any rights on deciding what can be done with the data.

The Insight Journal uses the same Creative Commons Attribution license.
You are welcome to submit your dataset to the Journal, along with a
paper (in the format of a technical report) describing the value of the
data and its potential use.  A template for the submissions to the
Insight Journal is available at:

http://www.insightsoftwareconsortium.org/wiki/index.php/IJ-Article-Template

It is true that the level of activity in the Insight Journal is not
yet what we want to see in our community. However, you should put in
perspective that we are talking about a journal that has 8 months of
life, and in that period already was used for hosting the papers of the
MICCAI Open Source Workshop 2005.

The summary of this event can be seen at:
http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/Dissemination:MICCAI_Workshop_2005

     * 37 papers were submitted
     * 90 reviews for those papers were posted
     * 31 reviewers contributed to open and public reviews
     * 0 anonymous reviews
     * 261 subscribers to the Insight Journal

Note also that the Insight Journal is not intended to be the typical
vanity-science journal where people publish just to met their annual
quota of papers required to account for their "productivity". That
empty practice is void of any scientific value and only demonstrate
how the principles of scientific research can be degraded when they
are evaluated by bureaucrats who simply "count" the number of papers
in your CV and your annual reports, but never read those papers, and
probably can not discern their implications.

The Insight Journal is after the important goal of recovering honesty
in the scientific endeavor by enforcing REPRODUCIBILITY.  Papers sent
to the Insight Journal are expected to be in the format of a technical
report that makes possible for *any* reader to replicate the results
described in a paper.

Papers submitted to the Insight Journal are published in a matter of
hours and are available in Open Access (gratis) to anybody in the world.

Any reader is empowered for posting reviews of a paper (non-anonymous),
and authors are able to reply to those comments. The reviewer's comments
are public and give an extra value to the readers.

When you are joining a revolution based on principles,
you should not ask

                "How many have already joined?",

instead,
you should be proud to be among the first ones to join.

         Welcome to the Open Access Revolution !!

   Regards,

        Luis

Is anybody still listening to music in tapes ?
Is anybody still using 5.25" floppies ?
Is anybody still reading papers published in closed access journals ?

-------------------------------
Will Ray wrote:
> Oddball question for the list, but I figure people here probably
> have the best ideas of useful venues for publishing volume
> datasets.
> 
> Specifically I'm looking for an appropriate place to
> publish/disseminate a volume dataset we acquired this past
> summer.  It's a rather high-resolution visible-light photo
> set, taken from a de-fleshed Chinchilla skull.
> 
> Fine bone (and some cartilage) detail is visible in the nasal
> passsages, (which was the point of doing the dataset), and we
> have a partially segmented version, segmenting for bone, that's
> probably 98% right, but still needs some minor corrections.
> 
> The raw dataset volume is on the order of 1024x1024x512, but
> we've done most of our work with a 1/4 planar resolution (512x512x512)
> downsampling.
> 
> 
> At this point, the project that was driving the creation of the
> dataset is pretty much finished with it, and probably won't take
> it much further in terms of model refinement, etc.  So I'm
> interested in turning it loose, if there's a useful venue for
> publishing it.
> 
> 
> I'm aware of the online Insight Journal, but from visiting the
> web page it's not clear to me that there's much life there, and
> due to the amount of effort that went into capturing this dataset,
> I'd rather not relegate it to a throw-away publication (of course, 
> my perception of the I.J. might be completely wrong, and you're
> welcome to tell me that as well).
> 
> 
> Many thanks for any suggestions,
> 
> Will Ray
> The Ohio State University Biophysics Department
> Columbus Children's Research Institute.
> 
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