[open-bibliography] Wikipedia project: bibliographic-archival data base

Tue Sep 13 18:54:59 UTC 2011

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 7:41 PM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle at kcoyle.net> wrote:

> Quoting Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.Berkeley.EDU>:
>
>
>  It is wrong to call data open if it is subject to arbitary access
>> restrictions like 3K entries a day.
>>
>
> Access restrictions of this nature generally are not related to openness
> but to system load.
>

This is one of the things I think we need to address. Unfortunately there
are other reasons for restriction - By downloading 20 items (sic) from a
well known publisher (to whom we paid a subscription) our University was cut
off for apparent attempt to steal content (not because we were overloading
their server). There are many, many sites who restrict use to a small
fraction of their content. You can have 0.0001 of the Cambridge
Crystallographic Database content "for free" - and I am challenging this -
given it is freely contributed by academics - see my blog. You can use <
100K of the 30,000K CAS identifiers (0.003).

If a site wishes its material to be downloaded then we should jointly
develop methods for downloading it (perhaps including mirrors). If it wishes
to control the practice and finance of a community then I personally will
challenge it, especially if the data was effectively provided by the
community.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-bibliography/attachments/20110913/87159ffb/attachment-0001.html>