[open-bibliography] comprehensive bibliographic database of "open" resources?

Tue Aug 17 17:42:08 UTC 2010

This is a very important and valuable discussion...

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 6:17 PM, Ross Singer <ross.singer at talis.com> wrote:

>
> > there are no rights on the metadata itself.  That can be indexed
>> anywhere,
>> > it's just the content that has restrictions.
>>
>> Not true. The highest quality largest aggregations of metadata are all
>> subject to
>> licensing restrictions. Publishers and secondary indexing services also
>> perpetuate the myth
>> of copyright in biblio metadata. There appears to be no copyright
>> protection for individual biblio
>> records provided by US law, but selections, arrangements, databases is
>> another matter. There might be
>> some copyright in a selection or arrangement, it is hard to tell, and for
>> databases we enter some more
>> difficult legal territory.
>>
>
> I guess we need to define the limits of what we mean by metadata here.
>  Title, author(s), journal title, date, page number, volume, issue, etc. are
> not copyrightable, else citeulike or zotero groups couldn't exist.
>

We absolutely need some consensus on this. Some people say thatw e can
collect this metadata without restrictions - others say we can't. There is
no technical reason why we cannot extract the metadata automatically
...

> The nice thing about building an infrastructure off of reading lists (and
> their US counterpart, reserves lists) is that this actually *is* a part of a
> lecturer/instructor/professor's job, so the incentive to maintain them is
> there.
>
> Building an aggregation service into a link resolver, like the Umlaut (
> http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Umlaut) would work, too - it's sort of
> like Last.fm, if I had to go there and tell it what I listened to today, I'd
> have as empty a profile as those Harvard scholar's pages.
>

Reading lists are only part of the use of bibliography. I suspect most
papers are not on any reading list, so reading lists will only tocuh a
minute fraction of the material. For example we are indexing 10,000 articles
from Acta Crystallographica and I doubt a single one is on any reading list.
Yest they are critical for data-driven science.

IMO for many sciences it is essentiall to have all the papers in their field
and if we rely on selections we shan't get the bullk of them.

>
> -
>

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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