The Fungal Records Database of Britain and Ireland
  2. Licensing records

Record and Media licensing

FRDBI users collect records and data on the FRDBI for a variety of purposes apart from being their personal record, such helping other mycologists, helping with conservation activities, planning, scientific studies, education and, last but not least, their mental and physical well being.

FRDBI users can now state the IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) licences, which are mostly Creative Commons licences, that are to be applied to their records and media. This is selected by editing their user account. The user will be able to set a different licence for both record and media, for example, a user may wish to state that their images cannot be used for commercial use but their records are freely available. This will allow records to be set on a user by user basis instead of the current single licence of CC NB-NC-SA which is applied to all records.

The licence can be changed at any time in the future. Any records downloaded  before a change will be subject to the licence applicable at the time. Any records downloaded after the change will be subject to the new licence. 

If you are an FRDBI user collating and entering data for several contributors then you will be assigning a licence for all those contributors. Should one of them wish to have a different licence they will need to transfer their records to a separate FRDBI user account and assign their own licence. Their records could still be included in group records but would be marked with a different licence. This should be made visible in any download of records by group administrators by including the licence field.

The full list of licences available is as follows:

  • CC0: Creative Commons "No Rights Reserved"
  • CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution
  • CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
  • CC BY-SA: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
  • CC BY-ND: Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives
  • CC BY-NC-SA: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
  • CC BY-NC-ND: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
  • ARR: "All Rights Reserved"

Further details and easily understood explanations about these CC licences can be found on the Creative Commons website. 

Too many choices?

Although photographers may require a larger choice of licences there are reasons for using a limited list of choices for records. The SA licence currently on FRDBI records means the same SA licence has to be applied to any further use of this data which may exclude FRDBI records from being processed and used in the State of Nature report for example. 

It is worth noting that the National Biodiversity Network and Atlas, part of GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Framework), has our records and only uses the following licences . The FRDBI records on the NBN website have a CC BY-NC licence. 

  • CC0: Creative Commons "No Rights Reserved"
  • CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution
  • CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial

Applying Non-Commercial licences

Deciding whether or not to apply a non-commercial licence is a personal choice for each user and these are just a few notes about what effects this decision can have for the records. 

Local Environmental Record Centres (LERCs) are a common source of data for ecological reports for planning and conservation assessments, a purpose many biological recorders wish their data to be used for. However any records with a CC-NC licence, from whatever source, cannot be used for commercial planning and conservation reporting even if the data is passed via an intermediate repository. Any FRDBI user wishing their records to be automatically and fully utilised by their LERC will need to apply a CC0 or CC-BY licence to their records. 

Applying a non-commercial licence (CC-NC ) to a user's FRDBI records would stop their LERC using them for planning application use. The user could however still choose to send their records directly to their LERC using a different licence, as many groups do now.

To automate the data flow to LERCs the FRDBI can make an agreement with any LERC to access and download data for their local area via their FRDBI user account. Any licences attached to the records will apply. 

Useful links on IPR and non-commercial definition: