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

Tue Aug 17 22:13:11 UTC 2010

  Peter Murray-Rust writes

> We absolutely need some consensus on this. 

  A consensus reach here is of no use if it does not match
  legal reality.

> Some people say thatw e can collect this metadata without
> restrictions - others say we can't.

  The way I see it (I have no formal legal education) is that, from a
  US perspective at least, a la Feist vs Rural Telephone, a compendium
  of factual data can not be copyrighted. The factual parts of a
  bibliographic descriptions are author name expressions, titles, and
  location information for full-text. Classfication data may or may
  not be considered as factual. Abstracts are definitely not.

  Fortunately, for author identification, we only need the
  factual components. These are the ones available at 3lib.org

> There is no technical reason why we cannot extract the metadata
> automatically ...

  But there are economic reasons. It's expensive to maintain
  scraping when sites change.

> 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.

  Again, when will this be available? 

  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel                    http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                                http://authorclaim.org/profile/pkr1
                                               skype: thomaskrichel