[OSM-talk] correct (scholarly) attribution?

[Greg Troxel]

Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> writes:

> Hi,
>
> if someone writes a scientific paper and wants to reference an OSM data
> set they used, what would be the correct way to do that? Typically such
> mentions contain author and name of the work, and publication place and
> year. Or maybe the web-like "retrieved on ..."?

I vote for not retrieved on but the date the data was extracted from the
main database, looking like "openstreetmap.org vector map data,
OpenStreetMap Contributors, extracted YYYY-MM-DD HHMM UTC".

My impression is that the publication date is for things where a journal
publishes them, and perhaps self-published blog posts, but for something
that is continuously modified, it doesn't really make sense.

It's also good to give a second citation to a journal article that gives
an overview the project, and surely that exists by now.  But I think the
most important thing is an unambiguous pointer to both OSM and the epoch
of data.