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

Sun Jan 9 00:37:48 UTC 2011

Karen Coyle <kcoyle at kcoyle.net> wrote:

> Isn't there also the issue that citations are considered part of the  
> text of an article?  In that sense, they are included in the  copyrightable portion. 

Sure, but in the U.S. at least, you cant copyright facts. Refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural
It is simply a fact if an article I write cites another article.
Copyright does not prevent me from reading an article and making a list of what articles it cites.

> However, if a third party reads the article and  
> makes the connections between citer and citee, then this may be a  separate declaration.

Right, this is pretty much my point. As far as I know this facet of copyright law has never been tested,
so it is really a gray area. But in any case, there is nothing to prevent us advocating to publishers that
they relinquish whatever hold they might think they have on citation data. I'm working on this issue specifically
with the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, which is a non-profit academic publisher with a very high
quality store of citation data, and I would like to see broader support for efforts of this kind.

> It is an unfortunate fact that many citations are "literary" rather  than "factual" 
> and Peter is right that a whole lot of citations don't  
> connect up to anything in the bibliographic world. 

This is really not the case in disciplines with a strong journal heritage like math and stat.
There is really no difficulty in identifying citations in these fields with biblio records of the
original articles in various databases.

> One of my dreams is  that citations would be derived from bibliographic data (rather than  
> being composed by authors) and would therefore contain the actual connections needed to be able to declare them as truly "bibliographic  
> DATA". 

This is already reality in my fields. Most articles I deal with have citation lists which the publisher links to MathSciNet and Zentralblatt.
In the case of data on Project Euclid at Cornell these data are readily harvested to form an open  citation index, with no objection
from the host, and I am planning to do that and encourage others to do the same.

> The capability for this almost exists in software like EndNote and Zotero, where citations are merely displays from actual data.  
> Keeping these connections as linked data would be ideal.

Indeed. I am pushing towards that goal.

--Jim