[open-bibliography] Principles for Open Bibliographic Data

[Peter Murray-Rust]

[copied to OKF's Open Bibliographic list, where the work was inspired and
took place] :-) What am I to say?

Taking the Panton Principles for Data (http://pantonprinciples.org/) as a
lead, Adrian Pohl got a few of us together and over the months the
Principles for Open Bibliographic Data emerged. It's not been trivial to
define Open Bibliography but I think we are all agreed that the core is
Open.

Moreover I have been in contact with the STM publishers (see
http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/02/04/bibliographic-data-is-open/ ) and
they have agreed that they agree with this. That gives us a useful legal
reference if we wish to start annotating documents with Bibliography (which
is part of what we intend to do at our upcoing BtPDF-inspired hackfest).

The immediate difficulty is that there are few - if any - Open collections
of bibliographic data (Scopus, WorldOfScience, Mendeley... are not Open). A
collection of Open bibliographic items is not by default Open (in fact by
default it is the copyright of the compiler). We may not like this (I don't)
but it seems to be the law. Note that by default NO citation iformation is
Open unless it comes from an Open Access or Open Data resource. That's a
major barrier to modern scholarship, but that's the way it seems to be... It
means we cannot follow citation trails without the explicit permission of
the "owners" (a word deliberately in quotes).

So in the hackfest we are going to use alternative Open collections of
biliographic data. No, I'm not going to announce how. Maybe you should come
to the hackfest.

But we are appealing to anyone who has collections of bibliographic data to
make them Open. Even a smallish collection can be valuable - it could be the
definitive resource for a given area of scholarship. Typical examples could
be reading lists or reference lists from key resources.

Note of course that an Open bibliographic collection can (and unfortunately
usually does) point to closed resources. But maybe that's better than
nothing?

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 1:51 PM, Anita de Waard <a.dewaard at elsevier.com>wrote:

> FYI - this seems very relevant for our discussion,
> best,
>
> Anita
>
> blio.net/principles/endorse/ <http://openbiblio.net/principles/endorse/>
>



-- 
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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