Attributing photos with Zotero - unclear how to incorporate CC licence details

alex.mitrani
Good afternoon

I've been using Zotero to attribute creative-commons licenced images that I obtained from flickr. It is very good how the Zotero connector in Chrome picks up the image metadata. However, while the type of licence appears in the "rights" field, I could not find a citation style that would produce a reference list compliant with the requirements of the creative commons licences (https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution).

The link to the licence is not stored, and it seems that none of the CSL citation styles include any mention of the licence. The hyperlink to the source flickr page (which specifies the licence details) is included, which should satisfy the legal requirements, but only just.

It would be great if in future (a) Zotero would store more details of CC licences (e.g. link to licence page such as "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/"), and (b) at least some of the CSL citation styles would include full licence details for images in reference lists. I note that there is a specific tool that generates attribution text for each individual image (http://openattribute.com/). It would be very useful if this functionality could be integrated into Zotero so that it would not be necessary to cut and paste text for each image.

I hope this suggestion is helpful.

Kind regards

Alex Mitrani
  • adamsmith
    I see the appeal, but I'm worried about mission creep here. Properly storing & referencing licenses isn't a giant technical hurdle, but it's also not insignificant (we need to pay more attention to rights, we need to be able to match text to specific licenses, we need to code the citation styles) and I'm a bit concerned that it's a bit of a stretch from Zotero's core concerns.
  • alex.mitrani
    Thanks for your reply. I understand your concern about mission creep. Is there a quick fix that you could suggest that would not require additional programming? For instance, I tried including links to the licences in brackets after the titles, but they got formatted in Sentence Case which broke the links. Perhaps this could be made workable by customising an existing citation style to remove the automatic application of sentence case to titles.
  • adamsmith
    Many styles don't touch the casing of titles, e.g. APA style doesn't, so that should work as a workaround.
  • alex.mitrani
    OK, thanks very much for your quick and helpful reply.
  • alhb
    It's great that Zotero gets the license metadata, especially for the images. According to Zotero Style preview tool (unless I'm mistaken), popular citation styles still not allow to include full license details for images in references lists/citations. On the off chance, would generous souls (and who would have more than 24-hour days) have adapted other citation styles to automatically use the field "rights" ?
    Whatever your answer, as always, thank you for everything you do for the community.
  • bwiernik
    To ensure capitalization isn’t changed in the title field, wrap the license info in <span class="nocase"> </span&gt> tags.

    Currently the Rights field doesn’t map to any CSL variable and so can’t be used in citation styles. There has been discussion of adding a “license” variable to CSL for this sort of application. https://github.com/citation-style-language/zotero-bits/issues/63

    That would still require technical consideration regarding data import, but would at least allow users to enter data as needed.

    @adamsmith Is this a variable that might fit into CSL 1.1?
  • adamsmith
    @bwiernik -- yes -- note the milestone. All items with the 1.2* milestone were marked as likely uncontroversial by zuphilip and me and maintain backwards compatibility of styles (i.e. they only add item types, terms & fields).

    *it's labelled 1.2 because with semantic versioning the current version should really be 1.1 so I thought we'd call the next one 1.2, but it doesn't really matter either way -- the milestone refers to the next minor CSL version.
  • alhb
    Thank you for these explanations and informations.
    Patience, then. Looking forward to taking advantage of this development.
  • bwiernik
    Sorry, missed the milestone section—I forgot that github separated them from labels.
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