There have been great posts already concerning software licensing, e.g. What license do you use when you release code and data?
However I have been looking to see what license that data given to public repositories such as GEO at NCBI come under.
So far I cannot see any data that falls under a know licence, generally it seems to be covered under the terms and conditions of the website. e.g for GEO.
Copyright Status Unless otherwise stated, documents and files on NCBI Web servers may be freely downloaded and reproduced. However, some material on this site, such as abstracts, may be copyright protected under the U.S. and foreign copyright laws. For such material, the submitting authors or publishers retain all rights for reproduction or redistribution. Permission to reproduce these documents may be required. All persons reproducing, redistributing, or making commercial use of this information are expected to adhere to the terms and conditions asserted by the copyright holder.
Is this correct? Are any of the major data warehouses to which biologist submit data covered by more standard open licenses? Should they be and is this fairly weak T&C sufficient?
By "standard open licenses" are you referring to software licenses (e.g. GPL)?
Yes, + apache, CC etc. I am actually struggling to find any detail, even in the T&C
I guess I'm not sure what applying one of the common software licenses would even mean in this context. While those also cover redistribution, modification (often the main focus of software licenses) doesn't really make sense in these cases (if you modify someone's sequence or structure data in a way other than just switching formats and then distribute that then you're just going to get sued).
Agreed, though Creative Commons may be more suitable in this aspect. I am just surprise that the T&C are so general or difficult to find. I would have expected some sort of license attached to public data.