[open-bibliography] introduction

Tue Jun 29 14:58:54 UTC 2010

Jonathan Gray wrote:
> Just to follow up from this -- I understand that the libraries
> involved in Europeana are in final stages of negotiating licensing
> terms. Any evidence or arguments about why Europeana should make the
> bibliographic metadata *open* (as in opendefinition.org) would be very
> much appreciated! In particular I understand that many libraries
> currently want to release with NC restrictions.

NC restrictions can be particularly problematic for catalog data, in part
because a lot of metadata, and support for discovery, can come from commercial
sources.  (In the former case, publishers and booksellers
push out a lot of metadata with their content to help sell it.  It's be nice
to be able to work with them.  In the latter case, commercial platforms
and add-ons can help a lot with discovery.  Consider the boost to
discovery Google Books gives for instance; and imagine how it might
improve -- and perhaps even drive traffic to libraries -- if it had good
library-quality metadata and information about libraries it can refer
people to.)

In general, it seems to me that it only makes sense to put a NC
condition on something if *you* have serious plans to commercialize
your work, and expect to depend on those plans enough that it makes
sense to prevent others from getting the jump on you.

If you just have a vague sense that you might get a revenue stream
from something someday, it's generally not worth putting the restrictions
on it, because you're making your data significantly less reusable now,
and a vague sense of making money later usually isn't worth that tradeoff.

If your concern is simply "but somebody else might profit from our own work!"
my answer is: "Yes. Why is that a problem?  Your users *now* profit,
hopefully, from what they learn in your libraries.  You don't demand
a cut of profits from what they develop as a result of what they read,
or demand that they can't commercially use what they learn from your
books.  Rather, isn't giving readers access to your materials so that
they can 'profit' your *purpose*?"

If there's a concern that commercial entities will try to monopolize
your data *to the detriment of libraries*, and there's a realistic
scenario you can describe in support of this concern, a SA condition will
take care of some of those issues.  Likewise, a BY condition
ensures credit is given.  (There are some good arguments that even
these conditions can be too burdensome in many cases, due to licensing
and record-keeping overheads.  But they're less problematic than NC,
at least, in my opinion.)

Does this help at all?

John