Data Management Planning tools: still immature?

I’ve spent the last few months looking at the JISC data management planning projects. It’s been very interesting. Data management planning for research is still comparatively immature, and so are the tools that are available to support it. The research community needs more and better tools at a number of levels. Here are my thoughts… what do you think?

At group or institution level, we need better “maturity assessment” tools. This refers to tools like:

• DCC CARDIO for assessing institutional readiness,
• the DCC Digital Asset Framework for understanding the landscape of data resources,
• repository risk assessment and quality assessment tools like DRAMBORA, Data Seal of Approval, etc
• security assessment tools including audits based on ISO 27000.

Some of the existing tools seem rather ad hoc, as if they had emerged and developed from somewhat casual beginnings (perhaps not well put; maybe from beginnings unrelated to the scale of tasks now facing researchers and institutions). It is perhaps now time for a tool assessment process involving some of the stake-holders to help map the landscape of potential tools, and use this to plot development (or replacement) of existing tools.

For example CARDIO and DAF, I’m told, are really tools aimed at people acting in the role of consultants, helping to support a group or institutional assessment process. Perhaps if they could be adjusted to be more self-assessment-oriented, it might be helpful. The DAF resource really needs to be brought up to date and made internally consistent in its terminology.

Perhaps the greatest lack here is a group-oriented research data risk-assessment tool. This could be as simple as a guide-book and a set of spreadsheets. But going through a risk assessment process is a great way to start focusing on the real problems, the issues that could really hurt your data and potentially kill your research, or those that could really help your research and your group’s reputation.

We also need better DMP-writing tools, ie better versions of DMPonline or DMP Tool. The DCC recognises that DMPonline needs enhancement, and has written in outline about what they want to do, all of which sounds admirable. My only slight concern is that the current approach with templates for funders, disciplines and institutions in order to reflect all the different nuances, requirements and advice sounds like a combinatorial explosion (I may have misunderstood this). It is possible that the DMP Tool approach might reduce this combinatorial explosion, or at least parcel elements of it out to the institutions, making it more manageable.

The other key thing about these tools is that they need better support. This means more resources for development and maintenance. That might mean more money, or it might mean building a better Open Source partnership arrangement. DMPonline does get some codebase contributions already, but the impression is that the DMP Tool partnership model has greater potential to be sustainable in the absence of external funding, which must eventually be the situation for these tools.

It is worth emphasising that this is nevertheless a pretty powerful set of tools, and potentially very valuable to researchers planning their projects and institutions, departments etc trying to establish the necessary infrastructure.

Is the PDF format appropriate for preserving documents with long perspective?

Paul Wheatley drew attention to this question on Stack Exchange yesterday:

“PDF is almost a de facto standard when it comes to exchanging documents. One of the best things is that always, on each machine, the page numbers stay the same, so it can be easily cited in academic publications etc.

But de facto standard is also opening PDFs with Acrobat Reader. So the single company is making it all functioning fluently.

However, thinking in longer perspective, say 50 years, is it a good idea to store documents as PDFs? Is the PDF format documented good enough to ensure that after 50 years it will be relatively easy to write software that will read such documents, taking into account that PDF may be then completely deprecated and no longer supported?”

I tried to respond, but fell foul of Stack Exchanges login/password rules, which mean I’ve created a password I can’t remember. And I was grumpy because our boiler isn’t working AFTER it’s just been serviced (yesterday, too), so I was (and am) cold. Anyway, I’ve tried answering on SE before and had trouble, and I thought I needed a bit more space to respond. My short answer was going to be:

“There are many many PDF readers available implemented independently of Adobe. There are so many documents around in PDF, accessed so frequently, that the software is under constant development, and there is NO realistic probability that PDF will be unreadable in 50 years, unless there is a complete catastrophe (in which case, PDF is the least of your worries). This is not to say that all PDF documents will render exactly as now.”

Let’s backtrack. Conscious preservation of artefacts of any kind is about managing risk. So to answer the question about whether a particular preservation tactic (in this case using PDF as an encoding format for information) is appropriate for a 50-year preservation timescale, you MUST think about risks.

Frankly, most of the risks for any arbitrary document (a container for an intellectual creation) have little to do with the format. Risks independent of format include:

• whether the intellectual creation is captured at all in document form,
• whether the document itself survives long enough and is regarded as valuable enough to enter any system that intends to preserve it,
• whether such a system itself can be sustained over 50 years (the economic risks here being high),
• not to mention whether in 50 years we will still have anything like current computer and internet systems, or electricity, or even any kind of civilisation!

So, if we are thinking about the risks to a document based on its format, we are only thinking about a small part of the total risk picture. What might format-based risks be?

• whether the format is closed and proprietary
• whether the format is “standardised”
• whether the format is agressively protected by IP laws, eg copyright, trademark, patents etc
• whether the format requires, or allows DRM
• whether the format requires (or allows) inclusion of other formats
• the complexity of the format
• whether the development of the format generally allows backwards compatibility
• whether the format is widely used
• whether tools to access the format are closed and licensed
• whether tools to access the format are linked to particular computer systems environments
• whether various independent tools exist
• how good independent tools are at creating, processing or rendering the format

and no doubt others. By the way the impact of these risks all differ. You have to think about them for each case.

So let’s see how PDF does… no, hang on. There are several families within PDF. There’s the “bog-standard” PDF. There’s PDF/A up to v2. There’s PDF/A v3. There are a couple of other variants including one for technical engineering documents. Let’s just think about “bog-standard” PDF: Adobe PDF 1.7, technically equivalent to ISO standard ISO 32000-1:2008:

• The format was proprietary but open; it is now open
• it is the subject of an ISO standard, out of the control of Adobe (this might have its own risks, including the lack of openness of ISO standards, and the future development of the standard)
• it allows, but does not require DRM
• it allows, but does not require the inclusion of other formats
• PDF is very complex and allows the creation of documents in many different ways, not all of which are useful for all future purposes (for example, the characters in a text can be in completely arbitrary order, placed by location on the page rather than textual sequence)
• PDF has generally had pretty good backwards compatibility
• the format is extremely widely used, with many billions of documents worldwide, and no sign of usage dropping (so there will be continuing operational pressure for PDF to continue accessible)
• many PDF creating and reading tools are available from multiple independent tool creators; some tools are open source (so you are not likely to have to write such tools)
• PDF tools exist on almost all computer systems in wide use today
• some independent PDF tools have problems with some aspects of PDF documents, so rendering may not be completely accurate (it’s also possible that some Adobe tools will have problems with PDFs created by independent tools). Your mileage may vary.

So, the net effect of all of that, it seems to me is that provided you steer clear of a few of the obvious hurdles (particularly DRM), it is reasonable to assume that PDF is perfectly fine for preserving most documents for 50 years or so.

What do you think?

Open postcode? That’ll be a “no” then!

A month or so ago I got an email from the OpenRightsGroup, asking me to write to a minister supporting the idea of retaining the Postcode database as Royal Mail is privatised, and making it Open. The suggested text was as follows:

“Dear [Minister of State for Business and Enterprise]
“We live in an age where location services underpin a great chunk of the economy, public service delivery and reach intimate aspects of our lives through the rise of smartphones and in-car GPS. Every trip from A to B starts and ends in a postcode.
“In this context, a national database of addresses is both a critical national asset and a natural monopoly, which should not be commercially exploited by a single entity. Instead, the Postcode Address File should be made available for free reuse as part of our national public infrastructure.The postcode is now an essential part of daily life for many purposes. Open availbaility would create re-use and mashup opportunities with an economic value far in excess of what can be realised from a restrictive licence.
“I am writing to you as the minister responsible to ask for a public commitment to:
“1) Keep the Postcode Address File (PAF) under public ownership in the event of the Royal Mail being privatised.
“2) Release the PAF as part of a free and open National Address Dataset.”

A few days ago I got a response. I think it must be from a person, as the writer managed to mis-spell my name (not likely to endear him (or her) to me!)

“Dear Mr Rushbridge,

“Thank you for your email of 6 February to the Minister for Business and Enterprise, Michael Fallon MP, regarding the Postcode Address File (PAF).

“I trust you will understand that the Minister receives large amounts of correspondence every day and regretfully is unable to reply to each one personally.  I have been asked to reply.

“The Government’s primary objective in relation to Royal Mail is to secure a sustainable universal postal service.  The postcode was developed by Royal Mail in order to aid delivery of the post and is integral to Royal Mail’s nationwide operations.  However, we recognise that postcode data has now become an important component of many other applications, for example sat-navs.

“In light of PAF’s importance to other users, there is legislation in place to ensure that PAF must be made available to anyone who wishes to use it on terms that are reasonable.  This allows Royal Mail to charge an appropriate fee whilst also ensuring that other users have access to the data.  The requirement is set out in the Postal Services Act 2000 (as amended by the Postal Services Act 2011) and will apply regardless of who owns Royal Mail.  It is this regulatory regime, and not ownership of Royal Mail, that will ensure that PAF continues to be made available on reasonable terms.  Furthermore, Ofcom, the independent Regulator, has the power to direct Royal Mail as to what ‘reasonable’ terms are.  Ofcom are currently consulting on the issue of PAF regulation and more information can be found on their website at: http://www.ofcom.org.uk.

“On the question of a National Address Register, the UK already has one of the most comprehensive addressing data-sets in the world in the form of the National Address Gazetteer (NAG).  The NAG brings together addressing and location data from Ordnance Survey, Local Authorities and Royal Mail; the Government is committed to its continuation as the UK’s definitive addressing register.

“The Government is similarly committed to ensuring that the NAG is used to its full benefit by both public and private sector users, and keeps pricing and licensing arrangements under review with the data owners.  Alongside our commitment to the NAG, the Government is continuing to consider the feasibility of a national address register.

“I trust you will find this information helpful in explaining the position on this subject.

“Yours sincerely,

“BIS MINISTERIAL CORRESPONDENCE UNIT”

So, that’ll be a “No” then. But wait! Maybe there’s a free/open option? No such luck! From Royal Mail’s website, it looks like £4,000 for unlimited use of the entire PAF (for a year?), or £1 per 100 clicks. You can’t build an open mashup on that basis. Plus there’s a bunch of licences to work out and sign.

What about the wonderful National Address Gazeteer? It’s a bit hard to find out, as there seem to be mutiple suppliers, mainly private sector. Ordnance Survey offers AddressBase via their GeoPlace partnership, which appears [pdf] to cost £129,950 per year plus £0.008 per address for the first 5 million addresses! So that’s not exactly an Open alternative, either!

Now I’m all for Royal Mail being sustainable. But overall, I wonder how much better off the whole economy would be with a Open PAF than with a closed PAF?

Some research data management terminology

Terminology in this area is confusing, and is used differently in different projects. For the purposes of a report I’m writing, unless otherwise specified, we will use terminology in the following way:

• Data management is the handing and care of data (in our case research data) throughout its lifecycle. Data management thus will potentially involve several different actors.
• Data management plans refer to formal or informal documents describing the processes and technologies to be deployed in data management, usually for a research project.
• Data deposit refers to placing the data in a safe location, normally distinct from the environment of first use, where it has greater chance of persisting, and can be accessed for re-use (sometimes under conditions). Often referred to as data archiving.
• Data re-use refers to use made of existing data either by its creators, or by others. If re-use is by the data creators, the implication is that the purpose or context has changed.
• Data sharing is the process of making data available for re-use by others, either by data deposit, or on a peer to peer basis.
• Data sharing plans refer to the processes and technologies to be used by the project to support data sharing.

Some JISCMRD projects made a finer distinction between data re-use and data re-purposing. I couldn’t quite get that. So I’m balancing on the edge of an upturned Occam’s Razor and choosing the simpler option!

Does this make sense? Comments welcomed!

How to plan your research data management (planning is not writing the plan!)

David duChemin, a Humanitarian Photographer from Vancouver, wrote a bog postduC13 at the start of 2013 (in the “New Year Resolution” season) entitled “Planning is just guessing. But with more pie charts and stuff”. He writes:

“Planning is good. Don’t get me wrong. It serves us well when we need a starting point and a string of what ifs.  I’m great at planning. Notebooks full of lists and drawings and little check-boxes, and the only thing worse than planning too much is not planning at all. It’s foolish not to do your due-diligence and think things through. Here’s the point it’s taken me 4 paragraphs to get to: you can only plan for what you’ll do, not for what life will do to you.”

OK he doesn’t really think planning is just guessing; in the post he’s stressing the need for flexibility, but also pointing out that planning (however flawed) is better than not planning.

That blog post is part of what inspired me to write this. Another part is a piecce of work that I’m doing that seems to have gone on forever. It seems like a good idea to put this up and see what comments I get that might be helpful.

Planning to manage the data for your research project is not the same thing as filling in a Checklist, or running DMP Online. The planning is about the thinking processes, not about answering the questions. The short summary of what follows is that planning your research data management is really an integral part of planning your research project.

So when planning your research data management, what must you do?

First, find out what data relevant to your planned research exists. You traditionally have to do a literature search; just make sure you do a data search as well. You need to ensure you’re aware of all relevant data resources that you and your colleagues have locally, and data resources that exist elsewhere. Some of these will be tangentially referenced in the literature you’ve reviewed. So the next step is to work out how you can get access to this data and use it if appropriate. It doesn’t have to be open; you can write to authors and data creators requesting permission (offering a citation in return). Several key journals have policies requiring data to be made available, if you need to back up your request.

The next step, clearly, is to determine what data you need to create: what experiments to run, what models, what interviews, what sources to transcribe. This is the exciting bit, the research you want to do. But it should be informed by what exists.

Now before planning how you are actually going to manage this data, you need to understand the policies and rules under which you must operate, and (perhaps even more important) the services and support that is available to you. Hidden in the policies and rules will be requirements for your data management (data security, privacy, backup, continued availability, etc). Hidden in the services and support will be some that will be very useful to you, and will save you time and diverted resources (institutional backup services, institutional data repositories, etc). As suggested above, these services and support could come from your group, your institution, your discipline, your scientific society, or your invisible college of colleagues around the world.

So now you can plan to manage your data. You may need to address many issues:

• Identification, provenance and version control: how to connect associated datasets with the experimental events and sources from which they derived, and the conditions and circumstances associated.
• Storage: how and where to store the data, so that you and your colleagues (who may be in other institutions and/or other countries with different data protection regimes) can work on it conveniently but securely. Issues like data size, rate of data creation, rate of data update may all be relevant here. Data backup! Encryption for sensitive data taken off-site. Access control. Annotation. Documentation.
• Processing: how will you analyse and process your data, and how will you store the results. Back to provenance and version control!
• Sharing: How to make data available to others, and under what conditions. Where will you deposit it? With what associated information to make it usable? Depends on the data of course, and issues such as data sensitivity. May also depend on data size etc. Which data to share? Which data to report?

That’s not everything but it’s the core. When you’ve done the basic planning at this sort of level, you can get down to writing the Plan! At this point the specific requirements of research funder and institution will come into play, and tools like DCC DMP Online will be useful. They may even remind you of key issues you had forgotten or ignored, or local services you (still) didn’t know about.

At this point you don’t know whether your research will be funded, so there is a limit to the amount of effort you should put into this. NERC wants a very much simplified one-page outline data management plan; it may be more sensible to have a 2 or 3-page plan covering the stuff above, and condense down (or up) as required by your funder.

But you’re still only at the first stage of your research data management planning! If you are lucky enough to get your project funded, there will be a project initiation phase, when you gather the resources (budget, staff, equipment, space). Effectively you’re going to build the systems and establish the protocols that will deliver your research project. At this point you should refine your plan, and add detail to some elements you were able to leave rather vague before. Now you’re moving from good intentions to practical realities. And given that life does throw unexpected events at you (staff leaving, IT systems failing, new regulations coming in), you may need to do this re-planning more than once. Keep them all! They are Records that could be useful to you in the future. In a near-worst case, they could form part of your defence against accusations of research malpractice!

My point is, this isn’t so much good research data management planning, as good planning for your research.

---

duC13 duChemin, D. (2013). Planning Is Just Guessing. But With More Pie Charts and Stuff. Vancouver, BC. Retrieved from http://davidduchemin.com/2013/01/planning-and-guessing/

The DOI has no clothes, and Publishers have taken them away!

So what’s the Digital Object Identifier for, really? I thought it was a permanent identifier so that we could link from one article to the articles it references in a pretty seamless fashion. OK, not totally seamlessly, since a DOI is not a URI, but all we have to do is stick http://dx.doi.org/ on the front of a DOI, and we’re there. So we should end up with an almost seamless worldwide web of knowledge (not Web of Knowledgetm, that’s someone’s proprietary business product).

Obviously the Publishers must play a large part in making this happen. They support the DOI system through their membership of Crossref, and supplying the metadata to make it work. And sometimes they remember that when they transfer a journal from one publisher or location to another, they can fix the resulting mess simply by changing the redirect inside the DOI system. (And sometimes they forget, but that’s another story.)

And of course, these big, toll-access, subscription-based Publishers trumpet all the Added Value that their publishing processes put onto the articles that we write and give to them (and referee for them, and persuade our libraries to buy for them, and…). So obviously that Added Value will extend to ensuring that all references have DOIs where available? A pretty simple thing to add in the copy-editing stage, I would have thought.

Except that they don’t. They display few if any DOIs in their reference lists of “their” articles. In fact my limited, non-scientific evidence-collecting suggests to me that they probably do the opposite to Adding Value: remove DOIs from manuscripts submitted to them. OK, I have no direct evidence of the removal claim, but I reckon there is pretty good circumstantial evidence.

I don’t have a substantial base of articles to work from (not being affiliated with a big library any more), but I’ve had a scan at the reference section of several recent articles from a selection of publishers. What do I see?

Take for example this editorial in Nature Materials:

Nature. (2013). Beware the impact factor. Nature materials, 12(2), 89. doi:10.1038/nmat3566

Yes, there’s a DOI in the reference I used. Mendeley picked that DOI up automatically from the paper. If I use that paper in a reference, the DOI will be included by Mendeley. This presumably  also happens with EndNote and other reference managers. (Here’s me inserting a citation for (Shotton, Portwin, Klyne, & Miles, 2009) from EndNote… yes, there it is, down the bottom with a big fat DOI in it.) (This is part of my circumstantial evidence for Value Reduction by Publishers! We give them DOIs, they take them away.)

Anyway, looking at that Nature editorial, there are no DOIs in the reference list. Reference 7 is:

7. Campanario, J. M. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 62, 230–235 (2011).

I tried copy/pasting that into Google. I get two results, neither of which appears to be a JASIST article. OK let’s try this one, in a completely different field, from an Elsevier journal:

McCabe, M. J., Snyder, C. M., & Fagin, A. (2013). Open Access versus Traditional Journal Pricing: Using a Simple “Platform Market” Model to Understand Which Will Win (and Which Should). The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 39(1), 11–19. doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2012.11.035

Again, none of the referenced articles have DOIs included in the reference list. Here’s a recent reference:

Jeon, D. -S.,&Rochet, J. -C. (2010). The pricing of academic journals: A two-sided market perspective. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2, 222–255.

Maybe that article (and all of the others) doesn’t have a DOI? Same trick with Google, we don’t get there straight away, we get to another search, for articles with the word “perspective” in that journal… which does get us to the right place. And yes, the article does have a DOI (10.1257/mic.2.2.222). Let’s try this article; surely Nucleic Acids Research is one of the good guys?

Fernández-Suárez, X. M., & Galperin, M. Y. (2013). The 2013 Nucleic Acids Research Database Issue and the online Molecular Biology Database Collection. Nucleic acids research, 41(D1), D1–7. doi:10.1093/nar/gks1297

No DOIs in the reference list. Here’s an odd one, from Nature again:

Piwowar, H. A. (2013). Value all research products. Nature, 493(7431), 159. doi:10.1038/493159a

Here they include no DOIs for actual articles, but there are URL-DOIs for Figshare! The first two references are:

1. Priem, J., Costello, K. & Dzuba, T. Figshare http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.104629 (2012).

2. Fausto, S. et al. PLoS ONE 7, e50109 (2012).

Do the latest OA publishers do any better? Sadly, IJDC appears not to show DOIs in references. I couldn’t see any in references in the most recent PLoS one article I looked at (Grieneisen and Zhang, 2012). Nor Carroll (2011) in PLoS Biology. But yes, definitely some DOIs in references in Lister, Datta et al (2010) in PLoS Computational Biology.

What about the newest kid on the block? You know, the cheap publisher who’s going to lead to the downfall of the scholarly world as we know it? Yes! The wonderful article by Taylor and Wedel (2013) in PeerJ has references liberally bestowed with DOIs!

When I tweeted my outrage about this situation, someone suggested it’s just the publishers simply following the style guides. WTF?

Publishers! You want us to believe you are adding value to our srticles? Then use the Digital Object Identifier system. Keep the DOIs we give you, and add the DOIs we don’t!

PS At one stage in preparing for this post I tried copying reference lists from PDFs and pasting them into Word. You should try it some time. It’s an absolute disaster, in many cases! Which is NOT the fault of PDF, it is the fault of the system used to create the PDF… ie the Publisher’s system. Added Value again?

PPS: here’s that reference inserted by EndNote:

Shotton, D., Portwin, K., Klyne, G., & Miles, A. (2009). Adventures in Semantic Publishing: Exemplar Semantic Enhancements of a Research Article. PLoS Comput Biol, 5(4), e1000361. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000361

EDIT: As the comments below suggest, my post is generally true insofar as PDF versions of articles are concerned, although even there some publishers (eg BioMedCentral) do incorporate a hidden clickable link behind the reference (in BMC’s case to PubMed rather than the DOI). Several publishers have MUCH better behaviours in their HTML versions, with both explicitly visible DOIs and clickable versions of references). Sadly, HTML has no agreed container format, and is next to useless for storing articles for later reference, so it is most likely that the articles you store and use on your computer will be the sort of stunted PDFs I describe here. I still claim: this is not good enough.

Changes to publisher agreements #PDFTRIBUTE

This is a bit late, as I couldn’t find the relevant agreement at the time just after Aaron Swartz’s death when the #PDFTRIBUTE movement started.. But I was taken by that proposal, that in memory of Aaron Swartz we should all try to liberate documents. The easiest and safest way to do that is to liberate our own documents. One way of achieving that is to deposit them in institutional repositories, or other places like Figshare. The safest way is to liberate documents you are publishing now or in the future.

Of course, many publishers don’t want you to do that, and they try to make you sign documents with various names like “Consent to Publish” that transfer your copyright to them. Sometimes they allow you to retain certain rights, sometimes including the ability to deposit a copy. But sometimes the document they ask you to sign doesn’t allow that.

My first suggestion is: read those documents carefully! They essentially take away all the rights to your work. My second suggestion: if you sign one of these documents, keep a copy. You may need to know later what you have signed!

I made a resolution many years ago only to publish in Open Access publications. This was easier for me than for many academics, as my job did not depend on publication in the same way. However, a few years ago I was asked to contribute a chapter to a book that was being compiled as a Festschrift for an ex-boss, a person I much admired. So I agreed.

The publisher sent me a Consent to Publish form, via email. It was a 2 page PDF with some moderately dense legalese on it. There were terms that I didn’t like such as “The copyright to the Contribution identified above is transferred to the Publisher…” and “The copyright transfer covers the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the Contribution, including…” lots of stuff. Not good. So I had a chat with another ex-colleague [EDIT: Charles Oppenheim] who is a bit of a copyright expert (but not a lawyer, and I hasten to add, neither am I). Between us we came up with a few changes. I tried to edit the PDF without success, as it was locked. So in the end I printed it out, struck out clauses I didn’t like, wrote in by hand clauses I did like, initialled them, signed the amended document and sent it off. No response from publisher, contribution accepted, then after the book was published I uploaded the chapter to the local IR. I kept a copy of the signed document.

So what did I change? The first clause quoted above was changed to “The exclusive right to publish the Contribution identified above in book form is granted to the Publisher…”. The second clause above was changed to “The right granted covers the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the Contribution in book form, including…” (the rest of that sentence continued unchanged “… reprints, translation, photographic reproductions, microform, electronic form (offline, online), or any other reproductions of similar nature…”).

Further down there was a sentence “The Author retains the right to publish the Contribution in any collection consisting solely of the Author’s own works without charge and subject only to notifying the Publisher in writing  prior to such publication of the intent to do so and to ensuring that the publication by the Publisher is properly credited and that the relevant copyright notice is repeated verbatim.” I suspect this clause was redundant as I had retained far wider rights than that (all rights except those transferred), but since I specifically wanted to put it into the IR with my other works, I changed “… Author’s own works without charge…” to “… Author’s own works or a collection of works of the Author’s institution without charge…”.

I also added at the end “The Author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of the Contribution”.

I’ve no idea if this is useful to anyone, but I offer it in case it might be. As noted, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Your mileage may vary, as they used to say in internet mailing lists when I was young, and your licence terms almost certainly will vary. But there’s no harm in trying to get the best deal you can, and amending and signing the proposed terms is one way. I reckon it’s better than asking. Send it in; they probably won’t even read it themselves. But keep a copy in case!