[open-bibliography] Fwd: News release: Referencing made easy

[Jim Pitman]

Owen Stephens <o.stephens at open.ac.uk> wrote:

> I have to disagree with this. The project was not about open bibliographic data per se, but we did consider issues around sharing of bibliographic data between staff and students with a focus on how this might happen in an online learning environment. 

Understood that your project was not set up to promote open bibliographic data.
My point is that it appears to have the effect of providing good bibliographic services to  RefWorks
institutional customers while not promoting open bibliographic data.
MyReferences appears to promote not open sharing, but closed sharing, where both 
the data sharing capability and the data itself are made available only to individuals at 
institutions which have RefWorks subscriptions.

> Additionally I really can't see how RefWorks restricts or licenses open bibliographic data?

>From http://www.refworks.com/RefWorks/help/refworks.htm#Terms_and_Conditions.htm

"Customer may use the Service for bibliographic research purposes in the internal operation of its organization only or, if Customer is an individual, for his/her personal use only."

This clause appears to forbid republication of any bibliographic metadata assembled through the
MyReferences system.
If MyReferences users have some other terms of RefWorks service which would allow them to republish
bibliographic metadata acquired through RefWorks licensing, I would be delighted to learn that
and to cooperate with MyReferences users to enlarge and improve the pool of open biblio metadata.


--Jim

----------------------------------------------
Jim Pitman
Director, Bibliographic Knowledge Network Project
http://www.bibkn.org/

Professor of Statistics and Mathematics
University of California
367 Evans Hall # 3860
Berkeley, CA 94720-3860

ph: 510-642-9970  fax: 510-642-7892
e-mail: pitman at stat.berkeley.edu
URL: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/users/pitman