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

Sun Jan 9 09:36:41 UTC 2011

On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 12:37 AM, Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.berkeley.edu>wrote:

> 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.
>

First I understand Jim's position - the issue is how we address it.

We have been through a lot of this in Panton for Open Data in Science. I can
argue that a graph of yesterday's weather is simply factual. But oponents
will argue that its an image and that all images are copyrightable. I might
win in court - I might not. So I think that claiming that citations are
facts will not win in some/most courts.

Karen is right that currently citations are behinde the paywall and are
regarded as part of the text of the article. We are almost the first group
to challenge this. We shan't win in 5 days - it will take longer (I guess 5
years for citations).

Note also that a collection of facts is copyrightable iin Europe. We have to
win the whole world. We may tackle this by winning the hearts and minds of
people in US first and then extending. But most content holders are
multinational. We've let them invade the territory without opposition and we
have a very hard job to win it back. (If we'd done this in 1990 it would be
a whole lot easier).

So, at present we shouldn't confuse Bibliography (which will be hard but
possible) with Citations (which will be even harder).

My immediate aim would be to get all major university libraries to sign up
and also leading publishers (who do not have a bibliographic content
business - i.e. we would be unlikely to get Elsevier but we might get
Nature).

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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