Briefing Paper: Legal Issues on Phenotype Data Accessibility A paper prepared following internal discussions of the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium, Interphenome and CASIMIR

A summary of a discussion of the terms under which phenotype data should be licensed by representatives of the mouse research community convened by Interphenome and CASIMIR and held at the 23rd International Mammalian Genome Conference in La Jolla, California, in November 2009. We compare two simple options of making data available to the public domain with three licensing options from Creative Commons (See Appendix B for the Legal Code that underlies each of these options), namely, cc0 or a waiver of copyright and database rights, cc‐By (attribution), and cc‐By‐SA (attribution and share‐alike). Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation that facilitates sharing through standard‐form free licenses and other legal tools (creativecommons.org).