[open-bibliography] FW: CfP: Semantic Web Journal Issue on Semantic Web and Reasoning for Cultural Heritage and Digital Libraries

[Jim Pitman]

William Waites <william.waites at okfn.org> wrote:

> But you are correct, the journal itself is a print publication
> and we don't have proper public metadata for it. I actually 
> contacted the editors about this some time ago and they are 
> planning to make bibliographic metadata available (in RDF) as
> I understand it. It's just a question of time and resources.
> I hardly think they're evil. They encourage openness but don't
> necessarily enforce it. Do you have any suggestions about 
> alternative journals that might be "more open" for this type of material?

I'm not familiar with enough with this space of journals to provide suggestions.

It does appear that IOS Press may be a small enough publisher that they
might be persuaded to publish their metadata with an open license.   I doubt that
a single journal could do this alone. The rights are owned by the publisher,
so the journal has to make the case to the publisher, and the publisher will want a common
policy for all its journals. Editors typically see little value in pushing for this sort of thing.  
If you go via the editor you have to train the editor how to make the case to the publisher. It should be more 
reward for less work to go to the publishers directly, best in collaboration with one or more editors.

It would be worthwhile for this group to formulate the business case of why it is in the interest of a small 
or even medium sized publisher to make their metadata open, and to formulate exactly what we are asking of them. 
There are many shades of gray for the potentially copyrightable fields of biblio metadata.
Need something simple for publishers and users alike to understand, like checkboxes for each field similar to 
components of a CC license. I dont think it is useful to spend a lot of time on abstract principles
unless we can persuade actual publishers to adopt open metadata licenses. We need to find
suitable publishers and start working with them. There will be a continuing see-saw between what 
idealists in this group might like to see and what publishers are willing to concede, much like the
balance over self-archiving rights.
If serious about pushing towards a more open balance, I suggest OKFN should team up with 
Sherpa-Romeo http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ to add some fields to their database for metadata licensing.

--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