biblatex-license

Author: Anselm Wagner a.wagner1@uni-wuppertal.de Bergische Universität Wuppertal v0.1

License: This material is subject to the LaTeX Project Public License 1.3c. https://ctan.org/license/lppl1.3

Requirements:

This package requires the LaTeX-packages 'biblatex' and 'kvoptions' to be installed.

Intro

This package provides a modification to the biblatex standard styles for relating cited works to the license under which they were published. This is done via biblatex’ build in related mechanism and relatedtype = license. This package basically provides this new relatedtype, the bibmacros for typesetting these related entries and some additional styling options.

Loading the package

The package is loaded via

\usepackage[options]{biblatex-license}

and has to be loaded after the biblatex package. The package sets the biblatex option related = true.

Options

• license : Decides if and how the license is to be printed. Default: short
• url : Switch for deciding if the url of the license should be explicitly printed. Default: false
• link : When set to true and url is set to off, the title of the license becomes an \href, i.e. a hyperlink. Default: true
• introtext: Makes it possible to replace the language specific intro text (e.g. “licensed under”) with custom text. Default: none

Usage

Consider the following bibliography:

@Misc{CreativeCommons4.0,
  author     = {{Creative Commons}},
  title      = {{Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International}},
  date       = {2013-11-25},
  url        = {https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/},
  urldate    = {2019-10-01},
  shorttitle = {{CC BY-NC-SA 4.0}},
}

@book{Payne2019,
  author = {Blakeley Hoffman Payne},
  editor = {{MIT Media Lab Personal Robots Group} and Cynthia Breazeal},
  title = {An Ethics of Artificial Intelligence Curriculum for Middle
            School Students},
  related = {CreativeCommons4.0},
  relatedtype = {license},
  url = {https://t1p.de/rwlp},
  urldate = {2020-01-27},
  date = {2019-08},
}

Note, that Payne2019 has the fields related and relatedtype defined. related is pointing via the label to the entry corresponding to the license under which Payne2019 was published: CreativeCommons4.0. The relatedtype = {license} is necessary for biblatex to know how this relation should be handled. Please see the biblatex user guide (§3.4 Related Entries) for more information on related entries.

More on the options

introtext

Note the text “Licensed under” in the bibliography. This text is, as of now, only translated to german but can be changed via the option introtext like so:

\usepackage[introtext={Some text}]{biblatex-license}

link

Also note that in the example output above the title of the license is itself a link to where the url-field of the license entry inside the bib-file is pointing. This link is made via \href.

url

It might be better to explicitly print the url of the license, which can be done via the url=true option. If printed this way, the option link has no effect on if this url is itself a hyperlink or not aus the url-field is handled by biblatex itself.

shorttitle of the license

If a shorttitle is provided for the license inside the bib-file, the shorttitle will always be preferred.