[open-bibliography] Sharing bibliographic user data

Mon Nov 15 21:20:36 UTC 2010

Quoting Karen Coyle <kcoyle at kcoyle.net>:

> As we know from experience with contracts (even implied ones) you have to
> make the right agreements at the beginning -- it is very  hard to change
> things afterward.

It doesn't seem to be too hard for BibSonomy to change the "contract",
i.e. the privacy protection. In the Terms of Use[1] it reads:

"2. The Terms of Use and the Privacy Statement may be changed without
notice. It is the user's responsibility to check the Terms of Use and
the Privacy Statement periodically."

And they have the pseudonymized data anyway because they give it to
other researchers:

"The entries are being used for research purposes in fields like spam
detection, recommender functions and are part of the data set, which
BibSonomy makes available in pseudonymous form for other research
facilities."

Because BibSonomy is a research project they also store other data
like IP addresses. But regarding open bibliographic data mainly the
publicly posted entries (BibTex-records(/URLs) + tags) would be
interesting. I don't think it would be legally hard to make this data
available to non-"researchers" for doing useful stuff with it.

Adrian

[1] http://www.bibsonomy.org/help_en/Privacy