On the twentieth anniversary of the revolutionary open publication of a “working draft” of human genome sequence data, Professor Tim Hubbard (@timjph) writes about the importance of this huge collective effort:
https://blog.okfn.org/2020/06/26/the-open-human-genome-twenty-years-on/
A remarkable undertaking, quite aside from the race to get a parallel private version under intellectual property protection. Neither the Hubbard article nor wikipedia discuss the open licensing involved. Is there coverage of the legal questions somewhere? Was simple publication outside of the European EEA sufficient to grant “open” status to the data? Or was the database explicitly licensed under a standard license or under some bespoke terms of use?
Afraid I need to defer to @timjph to ask for an answer to these questions.
The blog has a reference to John Sulston’s book. This gives some detail of brief discussions about applying an open content license to the human genome sequence, but in the end it was just easier for it to be in the public domain, through the policy of releasing each piece within 24hrs.