Below is a message I received from one of the researchers requesting support for subject recruitment.  I'm forwarding his questions because I think they get to the point of some of our discussions about sharing datasets and the redistribution of manuscripts produced as a result of a study. 

I'd like to recommend that Michael withhold his dataset until he feels comfortable publishing it, but I have been advising him that he is unlikely to get scooped on the results of a survey he performed.  I don't feel comfortable suggesting that he risk the rewards of his work against his own judgement.

As for the reuse rights.  It seems like we have discussed this and decided that studies that simply come to RCom for help vetting their proposed research would not need to provide rights to distribute the manuscript.  As a side-note, it is important that the language he references is changed to specify that the right to "adapt" the manuscript is not passed on to the Wikimedia Foundation.  I'd like to tell him that this requirement does not apply to him since he did not receive substantial support, but on the other hand, he research plan involves contacting a rather large amount of Wikipedians.  Thoughts?

-Aaron

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michael Tsikerdekis <tsikerdekis@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 2:13 PM
Subject: Re: University Email account
To: Aaron Halfaker <aaron.halfaker@gmail.com>


Hey Aaron,
first of all thanks for all the support with the project. I started reviewing a couple of things so that i can have everything ready when the time comes. I need your help with a couple of things.

First, i decided to publish the open data under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence. I don't believe that there will be anyone that would actually claim the research analysis as there own based on someone else's survey. I do hope though that people might in the future reuse the data and cross-reference it with data from other research surveys. Do you think i should put anything in the data page like "data can be used for publishing in a scientific journal after the author of the survey publishes the results first"? Or does it sound dumb and i am being paranoid? :-)

The second thing is about the reuse rights "The author(s) of the manuscript retains a non-exclusive right to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt their work, and grants WMF a non-exclusive right to do the same"
Most journals(if not all) grant an non-exclusive right for the author. I have no idea how to grant the same right to the WMF. I can put WMF as a co-author, but can you put an organization as a co-author? I could send an email to the journal when the time comes but i was wondering if you already know anything about it.

Mike