Background

Researchers can specify the license of a data package in its metadata. They can either use a standard license (e.g. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License), or use a custom license.

If the metadata of a data package specifies the name of a standard license (i.e. any license other than Custom), Yoda will include the license text in a License.txt file in the root of the package when it is copied to the vault. The URI of the license will be included in the metadata.

Installing licenses

This section explains how to upload license texts and URIs, so that Yoda can automatically include them in data packages. In the example commands below, replace ${RODSZONE} with the iRODS zone name. Replace ${LICENSE} with the name of the license, as defined in the metadata schema.

Yoda will look for the license text in /${RODSZONE}/yoda/licenses/${LICENSE}.txt and for the license URI in /${RODSZONE}/yoda/licenses/${LICENSE}.uri.

Installing default licenses

The files of the licenses included in the default metadata schema can be found in /etc/irods/yoda-ruleset/licenses. The command to upload these license files to Yoda is:

iput -r /etc/irods/yoda-ruleset/licenses /${RODSZONE}/yoda

Installing non-default licenses

Put the license text in a file named ${LICENSE}.txt. The {LICENSE}.txt file needs to be pure ASCII, in order to ensure it will be displayed correctly on every operating system and in every browser1. The license URI should be in a file named ${LICENSE}.uri.

iput "${LICENSE}.txt" "/${RODSZONE}/yoda/licenses/${LICENSE}.txt"
iput "${LICENSE}.uri" "/${RODSZONE}/yoda/licenses/${LICENSE}.uri"

Footnotes

  1. UTF-8 is not an option, because browsers will display a .txt file with the windows-1252 encoding. The ANSI subset of the windows-1252 encoding is not an option, because Mac and linux will not correctly detect ANSI in a .txt file if opened from the web disk. ↩