# Norms and Policies

These social norms are explicitly expected to evolve and mature if the number
of contributors to the project grows. It is important to have some policies as
a starting point, but also important not to set these policies in stone until
they have been reviewed.

See also the [Code of Conduct](./code_of_conduct.html) and
[Privacy Policy](./privacy_policy.html).

## Metadata Licensing

The Fatcat catalog content license is the Creative Commons Zero ("CC-0")
license, which is effectively a public domain grant. This applies to the
catalog metadata itself (titles, entity relationships, citation metadata, URLs,
hashes, identifiers), as well as "meta-meta-data" provided by editors (edit
descriptions, provenance metadata, etc).

The core catalog is designed to contain only factual information: "this work,
known by this title and with these third-party identifiers, is believed to be
represented by these files and published under such-and-such venue". As a norm,
sourcing metadata (for attribution and provenance) is retained for each edit
made to the catalog.

A notable exception to this policy are abstracts, for which no copyright claims
or license is made. Abstract content is kept separate from core catalog
metadata; downstream users need to make their own decision regarding reuse and
distribution of this material.

As a social norm, it is expected (and appreciated!) that downstream users of
the public API and/or bulk exports provide attribution, and even transitive
attribution (acknowledging the original source of metadata contributed to
Fatcat). As an academic norm, researchers are encouraged to cite the corpus as
a dataset (when this option becomes available). However, neither of these norms
are enforced via the copyright mechanism.

As a strong norm, editors should expect full access to the full corpus and edit
history, including all of their contributions.

## Immutable History

All editors agree to the licensing terms, and understand that their full public
history of contributions is made irrevocably public. Edits and contributions
may be *reverted*, but the history (and content) of their edits are retained.
Edit history is not removed from the corpus on the request of an editor or when
an editor closes their account.

In an emergency situation, such as non-bibliographic content getting encoded in
the corpus by bypassing normal filters (eg, base64 encoding hate crime content
or exploitative photos, as has happened to some blockchain projects), the
ecosystem may decide to collectively, in a coordinated manner, expunge specific
records from their history.

## Documentation Licensing

This guide ("The Fatcat Guide") is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution license.

## Software Licensing

The Fatcat software project licensing policy is to adopt *strong copyleft*
licenses for server software (where the majority of software development takes
place), *permissive* licenses for client library and bot framework software,
and CC-0 (public grant) licensing for declarative interface specifications
(such as SQL schemas and REST API specifications).