Hi,

Thanks for collecting these images, I am sure they will be very useful.

We (over at nipy.org/nibabel) are just finishing off our PAR ? REC converters, and we'd like to use your images to test against.

I see you are using the BIRN data license, but it looks like it is hard to find the original source of that license now.

Searches give the NITRIC copy : https://www.nitrc.org/help/trove_cat.php?trove_cat_id=583

This points to a now-dead link, archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20080827184041/http://nbirn.net/bdr/Data_Use_Agreement_09_19_07-1.pdf

Maybe it would be useful to resurrect the archived document somewhere?

Thanks,

Matthew

It�s archived on NITRC:
https://www.nitrc.org/help/trove_cat.php...
If this isn�t useful, please let us know how to make it more useful.
-Bennett

Sorry. A bit more clarity. The text archived on NITRC simply is a text extract of the PDF from nbirn.

I see that you found those� what could we do to make this process better?

Being a bit of a license zealot, I found myself reading the NITRIC
copy of the license, and then wanting to find the original copy, to
check it.

Just in case there were some other nerds like me, maybe it would be
useful to either:

- update the link in the NITRIC copy of the license to point to the
archive.org copy or
- use the FBIRN license, that does appear to be available at :
https://www.birncommunity.org/wp-content...

I've said this before I think, but the BIRN license is somewhat
unfriendly to open-source projects in the sense that you do have to
worry about people reading the license, and hence I would worry about
including any Rosetta data in our source repository. The OpenFMRI
PDDL is much more friendly in that respect, but hey, having the data
is already a big plus.

Another related problem is that the BIRN license is not attractive for
people with data they want to distribute under a more liberal license.

So for example, we may have some data that we want to release under
the PDDL or similar, but we would not want Rosetta to be the main
source for that data because we want to make it as easy as possible
for people to include the data in their own projects.

I'm open to asking folks for a different license. We just need no de-id clause.

As a matter of interest - why do you need the no de-id clause?

Folks are extraordinarily cautious about releasing data that could be legally used for something like:

Identifying Personal Genomes by Surname Inference
Science 18 January 2013:
Vol. 339 no. 6117 pp. 321-324
DOI: 10.1126/science.1229566

Do you mean that specific folks told you they would not release their
data without such a clause?

I had always imagined that the clause was effectively toothless, I
can't imagine that you could prevent people getting the data even once
you have demonstrated that they have identified it. In any case, by
that stage it is too late. Is the idea that the people using the data
will be frightened to de-identify it because of the license? Who
would prosecute them?

I agree that the terms are relatively toothless. However, all license terms are toothless. Is anyone suing if ADNI data do not have ADNI as authors? [As a reviewer, I�ve rejected a few papers that didn�t follow protocol, but there is always another journal].

I think the statement that contributors want to make is that de-identifying data break the trust that is placed in us as researchers. So, other researchers should agree to those terms.

But the problem is, that for a clause with very little practical
benefit, it has a significant practical disadvantage, because it makes
it much more difficult to redistribute the data as part of other
packages (like software packages) where it is common for people to
only scan the overall license. For example, Python packages can be
downloaded automatically with ``pip install nibabel`` or similar, with
no chance for you to review a license, unless you want to. This is
perfectly sensible for something like a BSD license, where problems
only come up when the person wants to distribute a modified version,
but it doesn't fit the spirit of the no-id license, because it would
be easy for the person not to read the license for the data in
particular.