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

Mon Jan 10 20:04:10 UTC 2011

Peter and others, thanks for thoughtful responses, I think its good to have this discussion.

As a strategic matter, I'm OK with not explicitly including citation data as
biblio data, if the group thinks that is strategically wise in securing quick support for the
principles. But I for one will continue to consider citation data as some kind of secondary biblio data, 
and I would favor at least mentioning it as such in the list of secondary biblio data types.

We should acknowledge that some types of biblio data, especially secondary biblio data, may be covered
by copyright in some jurisdictions. That does not prevent us from declaring that the biblio system
would provide better service to the research community if all biblio data including secondary data were opened up.
It is up to copyright owners to declare their data open. It is up to us to show them why it may be
in their own interests as well as the interest of millions of researchers to do so. There are many strategies
for that, which can be experimented with on many scales. I think we should try lots of approaches, see what is successful,
and pursue successful approaches further.

--Jim

Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> 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