This week, we report on a change in the licenses for the videos in our repository. We also report plans to expand our efforts to help researchers access video data sets from neuroscience experiments. We are delighted to find that our video repository has assisted many researchers. Videos from the collection have been included in several recent publications. To expand this effort, we will launch a new shared list of videos used in neuroscience research in the coming summer. The list will include videos used to develop the video analysis tools featured on our project’s website since it launched. The analysis package developers have repositories where you can find most of these videos. But some potential users are not aware of these resources. A shared list, rather than full posting of these videos, seems to be a good option. Abby St Jean, a junior at American University majoring in neuroscience, will be working on this project in the coming summer.
Regarding licenses for our video repository, a researcher requested a change to the license. The original license for the videos in the repository is CC BY-SA. Under this license, commercial publishers or image analysis groups need written permission from the original authors to use images or full videos in any commercial efforts. For example, to use an image from the video repository in a scientific article requires permission from the original authors for some journals. This issue also impacts the use of the videos for machine learning efforts by commercial groups. The researcher asked to change the license to CC BY. This license does not need written permission for commercial use of the videos or images from them. However, published work does require attribution. It should also have citations to the original creators of the content. This change does not seem to have any big impact. Any responsible publisher still requires authors of new content to cite the original work.
You can read about licenses for shared resources such as programs, design files, and data sets here: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/
The updated license is: CC BY 4.0 DEED Attribution 4.0 International License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The video repository can be accessed at this link: https://edspace.american.edu/openbehavior/video-repository/video-repository-2/