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Copyright issues

Posted by Mietchen on 05 May 2013 at 23:17 GMT

Fig. 3 and the video state that copyright of the map materials rests with these sources. How does that fit with the article (and thus also Fig. 3 and the video) being published under a CC BY license?

No competing interests declared.

RE: Copyright issues

seanslee replied to Mietchen on 07 May 2013 at 08:46 GMT

Dear Dr. Mietchen,

Thank you for your comment. My name is Sean Lee and I am the corresponding author of this paper.
I have also been approached by one of the associate editors of PLOS ONE regarding this point, and we are currently trying to assess the situation further. In the meantime, I felt somewhat uncomfortable about leaving your question unanswered for any longer, so here is my best answer at this point.

As far as I understand, Google requires the end users to provide attribution to both Google and their data providers, including the license symbols, when using their images (http://www.google.com/per...), and the data providers for figure 3 and supplementary animation are Cnes/Spot Image and TerraMetrics, hence the citations in the captions. Unless I am mistaken about how to use Google Earth images for academic purposes, the materials should not be incompatible with CC-BY license as long as there is a proper attribution to both Google and their data providers every time they are being used.

Please also note that Google Earth images are being published throughout various PLOS journals.

Thank you again for paying attention to the paper.

Best regards,
Sean

No competing interests declared.