[open-bibliography] WorldCat API and Licensing

Tue Jan 11 01:41:53 UTC 2011

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

> I'd agree with what Tom says. There may or may not be uses for
> NC-bibliography but it cannot be included in Open Bibliography as we are
> using it. The increasing availability ofg NC may help change the culture but
> at the bottom we have to have complete Openness.

I dont see why an NC clause significantly inhibits free exchange of  bibliographic data.
That is enough for my purposes. Generally, I see the arguments against NC as greatly overstated. 
There are an increasing number of agents who seem to be willing to tolerate NC, so I think it is 
important to take them at their word and demonstrate significant NC applications of their data.

Also, just because some component of bib data I use comes with an NC clause does not seem to prevent
me from saying my contribution is CC0. I claim no additional copyright layer, I declare where my
data come from and who has checked them, and move on to other things. Others can do whatever they
want with the data.  What is wrong with this picture?

> We assert that individual bibliographic components are Open so that we can
> reasonably show that we have not taken them from someone else's collection.

I dont see how "we" can make individual bibliographic components Open by saying they are.
Either they are by law, or they aren't, and some copyright ownner, not us, can make them so.

> Since most of these are normalizable data then once we have got them, they act as a permanent record.

OK

> If we take them from NC collections then they contaminate the rest of our Open collection.
So what? Why is that so bad? I just dont get the virulence of the argument against NC. What I do see is there
are a large number of major biblio data providers in the article space where I think I could fairly easily persuade
them to provide data NC, by arguing e.g. the OCLC has already done so, its the emerging standard, .... but it
may be very tough to get a full CC0 declaration from these sources. I'm willing to try, but I'm not going to 
spend a lot of hours on this. I'd rather spend the hours doing creative processing of data I can get hold of with NC.

> I am optimistic that as we get momentum then there are enough OKD-compliant data that we can build the mass of Open Bibliography quite quickly.

I agree with this  in the Book biblio space, but not in the Article space. I think the vested interests which hold most of the article data,
which are not the libraries but the publishers  and A&I services, may be too entrenched  to yield this data easily. Certainly, I see great
resistance in the field of mathematics.

--Jim