I got a request from EasyBib.com for CSL citation license

adamzeil

I helped write the citation style code for a few journals for the Zotero Style Repository a while back. I recently got an e-mail from someone at EasyBib.com asking if the company could use the citation styles I created and which licensing scheme they should use. Has anyone else gotten an e-mail like this? Is this spam? What have folks done with this request? What licensing schemes have you used?

adamsmith

I didn't get one, but my e-mail isn't in most of the styles.
All your styles on the repository are licensed I believe (i.e. they have a <rights> tag)? Almost all styles on the repository are licensed under a creative commons Attribution-Share Alike (by-sa) license and that's the license they should/must keep using if they use the styles.
The site looks legit enough.

ajlyon

The licensing recommendations are here: http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/sharing styles

The current recommendation is to use the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

It probably isn't spam-- and they don't need to ask for your permission, so long as they abide by the terms of the stated license.

Rintze

See also http://xbiblio-devel.2463403.n2.nabble.com/EasyBib-amp-CSL-attribution-td5441396.html

I hope the EasyBib people haven't emailed all the style authors. I can imagine that would be a bit annoying.

ajlyon

Since the Nabble link was being picky when I first tried to find it, see also the SF.net version: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=CAA2AEA1-B82E-4BEF-BCF5-3CF2E7DF53A8@simonster.com&amp;forum_name=xbiblio-devel

No mention yet of CSL on the EasyBib site, but I hope this integration and new usage of CSL and citeproc-js leads to even more improvements in the community.

bdarcus

Yeah, it's not spam; they're just trying to "do the right thing" (which isn't entirely clear, at least to me).

fbennett

I had correspondence with the EasyBib project a year ago, when they were considering deployment of CSL. I believe their recent mail only went out to the authors of styles that were missing a rights attribute -- I only received a notice concerning bluebook-19th, from which it was indeed missing.

The EasyBib project is a welcome adoption for CSL. Their core product (simpler than Zotero) targets high school essayists. The project's aim with CSL support is to offer an incremental upgrade path to their users, first moving to CSL-based styles within the EasyBib product, but with the option of migrating data to other reference managers (including Zotero) for more demanding tasks. It's a good thing.

(Edit: I'll correspond with the project about attribution, but I don't imagine there will be any difficulty.)

adamsmith

Sounds great to me - the more people/projects use the styles the better, that's the point of the CC license after all. I don't see any issues, CC is easy enough to comply with, they leave the license and attribution in the styles and should probably mention them somewhere on their website.

adamzeil

Thanks everyone for your input. It was really helpful, and I have a much better idea of what's going on. I'll make sure the EasyBib guy knows the citation styles are under Creative Commons.