[Open-access] Copyright on abstracts, bibliography

Thu Feb 9 14:08:59 UTC 2012

To clarify (disappointingly) some of the concerns about copyright of
bibliographic information:

   - abstracts are copyright (
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_%28summary%29 )
   - bibliographic collections (but not the individual articles) can be
   copyrighted under the sui generis directive in Europe and elsewhere (but
   not US)
   - probably keywords, identifiers are "added value" from the publishers

In the Principles of Open Bibliography http://openbiblio.net/principles/ we
outlined core data which were believe are not copyrightable and secondary
data which we know or suspect will be actively contested by some
publishers. We should stick with core data when we create databases from
other sources. Of course any data we create is our own. We can abstract
papers and add our own keywords - this must be sufficient original that it
is clearly our work.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-access/attachments/20120209/c2772b90/attachment.html>