[open-bibliography] (Final?) discussion of the openbiblio principles

Sat Jan 8 17:38:44 UTC 2011

Adrian, I have one more thought. I suggest putting into "Secondary data"
"indication that one work is derived from, related to, or cited by another work"
This is a nice rhetorical progression, because few would deny that the fact of one
work being derived from or related to another is essentially public domain, and
citation by citation one could make the case for "cited by" too. Publishers
often engage in the noxious practice of making citation lists available only to subscribers,
and citation idexerss hoard the citation data. This is something we should  be pushing back against.
One of the greatest potential benefits of open biblio in the journal article space is if
we can open up the citation graph which was until recently controlled by Thomson-Reuters, 
but which is gradually becoming more open due to efforts of CiteSeer, Google Scholar,
Microsoft Academic Search and others including David Shotton and myself. We need to make the point 
to publishers that it is in their own interest to release their citation data and allow it to be fully processed
by the community without licensing retrrictions. And too bad for the current citation indexers if they get disintermediated.

Also, we should definitely not make a statement of open biblio principles which might later be used against
us by saying even we did not indicate citation data might be covered!

This comes back to the copyrightable/non-copyrightable issue. Our point should be that  whether or not various
elements of this biblio data are copyrightable or restrictable by licenses, it is in the greater interest of the scientific 
community for publishers and data aggregators to make all this information freely available. Then let the various agents compete with 
each other on a new playing field for the quality of services they can provide over this data, rather than competing for control of the data.

--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

> Hello Jim,
>
> thanks for your valuable input. I incorporated both your proposals
> into the document. In principle 3 it now reads: "These licenses make
> it impossible to effectively integrate and re-purpose datasets. They
> furthermore prevent commercial services which add value to
> bibliographic data or commercial activities which could be used to
> support data preservation."
>
> I hope everybody is OK with this. Anyway, it's still time for more
> changes. e.g. to change the "strongly recommend" part...
>
> As attachment a PDF version of the current principles draft which
> Peter might use for the symposium. Fortunately it fits on two pages!
> (Karen, as I made some more changes I created a new pdf.)
>
> Adrian
>
> 2011/1/7 Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.berkeley.edu>:
> > Adrian Pohl <adrian.pohl at okfn.org> wrote:
> >
> >> I've already made some more changes on the google doc
> >> and added comments to the document to initiate further discussion, see
> >> http://bit.ly/gIfB11
> >
> > Overall, it looks very good to me now. Especially, staying away from the copyrighable/non_copyrightable
> > issue seems very effective.
> > I added a few suggestions like this  [ suggestion JP].
> > Adrian, please incorporate as if see fit. Or others could add their approval or disapproval
> > inside the [...]. I'm not sure what the protocol is for making changes.
> > --Jim
> >
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> >