User and IPR (Intellectual Property Rights)

How will GLORIA profit from the interaction between scientific and non scientific community?

GLORIA is going to seek the collaboration of amateur astronomers and their telescopes. Some amateur astronomers are very active, with excellent instrumentation and observing locations. However they are frequently limited in their ability to properly exploit and interpret their data. Interaction with professional astronomers and the use of powerful customized analysis tools will greatly improve the quantity, quality and reliability of the data that amateurs can collect with their instruments. GLORIA will profit from their telescopes, the data they produce, and simply the extra knowledge, experience and ideas their presence will bring.

How are we going to measure the participation of an user?

GLORIA associates with each user a meritocratic parameter, called "Karma" in most Web 2.0 environments. This is correlated with the user's activity and their performance of useful work, and in the context of GLORIA, is how access to scarce resources (such as telescope time) is determined. Calculation of karma is done automatically via the votes of the community over the work of each user. This method has been successfully proven in many collaborative web sites such as youtube, etc.

What about the IPR for the standards and software produced in GLORIA?

All the standards, software and documentation will be offered to the community under free licenses to use, distribute and modify (so-called copyleft licences), as the GLORIA consortium has been doing up to now.

What about the IPR for the content generated by users, such as images?

The authorship will be recognized but must be licensed under copyleft, and users of GLORIA must accept this condition when they join. Image data can be held restricted for a limited time, allowing the author to be the one to make the expected scientific discovery. At the end of this period, images will normally be made available to all.

What about the IPR for scientific discoveries ?

Users must accept certain conditions when they get an account in GLORIA. The author of a discovery is the user who reports it to the community. Record will be kept of which telescope was used, which user originally took the images, and all users who contributed to the discovery in some way. Users should cite GLORIA in all dissemination of information about the discovery. All the content produced by users will be free content protected with copyleft licenses.