02-provenance.md

Keeping on top of provenance

• Licenses
• Streamlining for reproducibility

Licenses

Where does the file come from?

• How can we describe this later to somebody?
  • Point and click is long to describe
  • What are the rights we have?

What is a license?

A license (licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit).^{1 2}

Examples

• Creative Commons licenses, used for artistic products and data
• Open Source licenses (BSD, GPL, MIT, etc.), used for software (code)

License applying to Geodist data

• CEPII GeoDist is under an "Etalab 2.0 license"

Can we re-publish the file?

Downloading via code

Easiest:

Stata

use "$URL" , clear

Why not?

• will it be there in two months? in 6 years?
• what if the internet connection is down?

Easy:

Stata

global URL "https://www.cepii.fr/distance/dist_cepii.dta"
copy "$URL" (outputfile), replace

R

download.file(url="$URL",destfile="(outputfile)")

We will get to even better methods a bit later

Creating a README

• Template README
  • Cite both dataset and working paper
  • Add data URL and time accessed (can you think of a way to automate this?)
  • Add a link to license (also: download and store the license)

Link

Step 1: Stata, R ³

Footnotes

1. Cambridge Dictionary ↩

2. Wikipedia ↩

3. 🔒Tag: stage1 ↩