Attribution with a CC license vs. Traditional Citation Styles: 1) Any Updates? 2) Suggestion

I am experimenting with a large textbook project. Some Open Education Resources (OER) would make this textbook better (and maybe even feasible). However, fiddling around with attribution-style citations with licenses is, at best, annoying and time-consuming. It might be helpful to know what future help I could anticipate from my Zotero use. I realize, in the past, these attribution-style citations were somewhat out of scope compared to the more traditional academic citations, but is this changing?

1) Any Updates? I would appreciate any information on your current plans on supporting styles for attribution-style citations. (Either as an option to add a license to existing style(s) or in new attribution credit style(s). I realize for the latter, there may not be a formal standard but Creative Commons and others have some suggestions.)

2) Suggestion. Assuming you agree that a creative commons of Open Education, Open Science, etc. is desirable goal, I might suggest that you could help in moving us toward that goal by making a number of robust attribution-style citation styles. It does not appear to me there is much technical support in this area by others and Zotero is well positioned to add this support (e.g. it often already grabs the rights/license from many sites but trying to actually *use* this information is not easily achieved by most users.)

  • There's movement on CSL to include a variable that maps to Zotero's "Rights" and with that, a basic attribution declaration as part of a citation would be possible. I think we're talking about a "likely (though not guaranteed) to happen this year" time estimate for this.

    How exactly to use that in terms of making styles available etc. will require another discussion, but at a minimum it'd be possible to offer a couple of common options _somewhere_ pretty easily.
  • Thanks! That is good news.

    FWIW, in thinking about these possible styles...
    *perhaps* my primary use cases would be helpful?

    1) a rather short attribution suitable for being added at end of a caption for photos, images, tables from open-licensed research articles, Wikimedia, etc.. Presumably, these are stored as "artworks" in Zotero. How to cite the source succinctly might be a consideration. Perhaps, DOIs, hyperlinks to URLs, or...?

    If the research paper that the artwork is from is critical to the science, the paper itself may be added to bibliography,. In that case, a citation to source paper might be useful.

    But what about a more trivial use of a wikimedia image or similar? In that case, it might be overkill to add those sources to a traditional bibliography, so those attributions could stand alone.

    Perhaps this from Creative Commons might be helpful?
    https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution.

    A first step might be to create a standalone style that looks like the Creative Content suggestions (i.e. without complicatiins of it as part of larger work/paper or of compiling these entries in a "bibliography".)

    Just copying these in one at a time from the clipboard into captions would be a blessing.

    2) use or remixed modifications of text, esp for tutorials and software use sections in appendices. I would like to attribute this at begining of relevant section with a footnote.

    In this case, presumably, something that looks like a full Chicago author-date entry with the license would be a useful begining.
  • Does/could the CSL variable "license" map to Zotero's "Rights"?

    If so, using the https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution example, Zotero does a brilliant job of pulling the relevant details from Flickr. All you need to do manually is change Rights from "Attribution License" to "CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)" and add any modifications you make to the image under Extra - for example "Desaturated from original"

    Might someone be able to create a CSL that could then output:

    "Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco" (https://www.flickr.com/photos/sixteenmilesofstring/8256206923/) by Timothy Volmer, CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) / Desaturated from original

    From
    "Title" (URL) by Artist(first) Artist(last), Rights / Extra

    (ideally using angle brackets around the URL's - the comment system ignores everything in angle brackets...)
  • That's what it is intended for, but not yet implemented on the Zotero end
  • Thanks Adam

    Is implementation a lengthy or low-priority task? Is it something a newcomer could help with?
  • It's neither, really, but any changes to the data model involve lots of moving parts, which also means it's about the least suitable dev work for outside contributors
  • Thanks again Adam - I think that sounds encouraging... Would it be impolite to ask for an ETA? Just so I can consider how to schedule my work - I have a lot of artwork to attribute.

    If there's anything at all that I may be able to do to help, just ask.
  • I don't know -- I understand that the hope is certainly to get most of these changes in this calendar year, but planned timelines have been significantly off in the past, so this is very much not a promise (I'm also not the one implementing them, so it's doubly not a promise)
  • Ah, OK, thanks Adam.
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