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

Sun Jan 9 09:41:23 UTC 2011

Hello,

Jim initially suggested putting into ""Secondary data" "indication
that one work is derived from, related to, or cited by another work"".
I don't see a problem to include "indication that one work is derived
from or related to another work". If this information exists in a
bibliographic description it should of course be made open too.

Concerning citations data we might first make clear what we are
talking about. Wikipedia[1] says (not general enough but ok for this
purpose):

"Broadly, a citation is a reference to a published or unpublished
source (not always the original source). More precisely, a citation is
an abbreviated alphanumeric expression (e.g. [Newell84]) embedded in
the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the
bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of
acknowledging the relevance of the works of others to the topic of
discussion at the spot where the citation appears."

I agree with Peter that in this sense citations aren't (and mustn't)
fully be covered by the principles. But I think that a big part of
citations data is already included in the principles: bibliographic
reference lists. A bibliography or reference list of a monograph or
article identifies/locates all bibliographic resources that are cited
in a text. It is an aggregation of bibliographic descriptions (as a
journal data base or library catalog is) in aphabetic order and
nothing else. (BTW, that is why "scholars" are named in the principles
as "producers of bibliographic data".)

So citations are already covered in part by the principles but not
fully because citation counts, citation context etc. aren't included.
And I don't think that we should include these. We might rather add a
phrase to explicitely include reference list. What do you think?

Karen writes:

> Isn't there also the issue that citations are considered part of the text of
> an article? In thathas to be read as  sense, they are included in the copyrightable portion.
> However, if a third party reads the article and makes the connections
> between citer and citee, then this may be a separate declaration.

At least bibliographic reference lists aren't covered by copyright. In
Germany we even have a letter[2] from the "Börsenverein des deutschen
Buchhandels" - the legal representation of publishers - which makes
clear that it is legally unproblematic to digitize and disseminate
bibliographic reference lists. (It says the same about index of
tables, lists of figures, name, place and subject indexes are listed
as not protected by copyright.)

Adrian

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation

[2] http://www.bibliotheksverband.de/fileadmin/user_upload/DBV/vereinbarungen/Boersenverein_110707_Kataloganreicherung.pdf

2011/1/8 Karen Coyle <kcoyle at kcoyle.net>:
> Quoting Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk>:
>
>
>> By contrast the citations are subjective and potentially ambiguous or
>> "wrong". In an ideal world the bibliographic data are nodes in a graph and
>> the citations are (annotated) edges. In practice many citations point to
>> non-existent or ambiguous nodes  - and this is in some cases irresolvable.
>> An article can be created (and many are) without citations. An article
>> must
>> have a single set of bibliographic data.
>
> 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.
> However, if a third party reads the article and makes the connections
> between citer and citee, then this may be a separate declaration.
>
> 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. 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". 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.
>
> kc
>
>
> --
> Karen Coyle
> kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
> ph: 1-510-540-7596
> m: 1-510-435-8234
> skype: kcoylenet
>
>
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