[open-bibliography] Metadata aggregators, discovery tools and libraries

[Jim Pitman]

Adrian, all very interesting, and kudos to Jonathan for airing out this
issue in the blogosphere. Following are some comments.


> "Many many publishers these days provide RSS feeds with metadata of
> their recent publications. By consuming these feeds, and storing what
> you get over time, JournalTOCs is building a giant database of article
> metadata — that only goes back as far as when they started collecting
> it. My impression is that JournalTOCs is looking for a way to monetize
> this at a profit however, rather than provide it in a cooperative
> cost-sharing basis."[4]
> Similar approaches have already been discussed on this list. Have you
> already heard about this service? Obviously nobody has objected yet
> against what it does. Maybe we could approach them about opening up
> the data... Interestingly, their API is licensed CC-BY.[5]

Well, the JOurnalTOCs API is CC-BY so there seems to be no legal impediment to massively caching
and re-exposing their data, and e.g. feeding it to Krichel's authorclaim.  I can provide funding for API plumbing to feed data 
in subjects I care about from JournalTOCs to a place where I am more confident it cant be closed off and I and other biblio researchers 
have bulk access by rsync or similar for industrial processing. Anyone out there available to do this
sort of work? Or suggestions of good contractors for this purpose?
I could do some of this with Berkeley based resources, but I would much rather see a distributed effort of this kind.
I would love to see OKFN provide the server and database support for this.
I have no problem with using CC-BY for this purpose. You just stick in each record a field with
the CC-BY acknowledgement, and then these records can be freely exchanged and mixed with others.
Especially if subsequent aggregation is done with CC0, it seems there is no attribution stacking.
Anyone else can aggregrate subsets with CC0 too, and the individual records only need to carry the original
CC-BY from JOurnalTOCs.

In any case I think JournalTOCs is providing a great service, and OKFN should do what it can to engage them 
and to encourage and support their efforts.  Anyone on this list have a connection to JournalTOCs?

--Jim

> [1] http://pegasuslibrarian.com/2011/01/heads-they-win-tales-we-lose-discovery-tools-will-never-deliver-on-their-promise.html
> [2] http://friendfeed.com/lris/f9c18716/heads-they-win-tales-we-lose-discovery-tools
> [3] http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/
> [4] http://bibwild.wordpress.com/2011/01/22/more-on-aggregating-article-metadata/
> [5] http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/index.php?action=about