[open-bibliography] BibSoup/BibServer collaboration model?

Fri Feb 3 14:15:58 UTC 2012

Mark, bravo for this post!

> So the question is, should we contest such claims, or are they reasonable claims to make?

The declared purpose of this working group to contest such claims, and thereby protect 
and enlarge the public domain of biblio metadata. 

--Jim

> Sure, some person or business may incur costs whilst developing a service,
> and may justifiably want to recoup that cost and turn a profit. This is
> typical business practice - find a way to add value, and find customers
> willing to pay for it.
>
> But doing so by placing restrictions on subsequent reuse of some coincident
> resource - in this case bibliographic metadata - is not finding that way;
> rather, it is an obfuscation. Risk and effort involved in the process of
> adding value are being mitigated by making simultaneous claims to ownership
> of the resource around which value is being added.
>
> of course, this is a great business plan; reduce risk and effort by owning
> more things. These claims to ownership will be accepted unless they are
> contested.
>
> So the question is, should we contest such claims, or are they reasonable
> claims to make?
>
> I find it unreasonable that someone be allowed to pollute a resource during
> the process of their attempting to exploit it for profit; there is no
> reason why their attempts should restrict my desire to utilise said
> resource.
>
> this is doubly true in the contexts of service delivery and intellectual
> property.
>  On Feb 2, 2012 11:12 PM, "Thad Guidry" <thadguidry at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > There is a COST to collecting facts, however.  Each one of us on this list
> > gets PAID for our time by our employers collecting various facts and even
> > maintaining them.  Someone has to bear the cost of collecting and
> > maintaining public facts, and others will want to form a business model in
> > maintaining and improving the collection of those public facts.  I agree
> > that Mendeley is not a public institution, and I also agree that Mendeley
> > with good technological resources and ideas is allowed to form that
> > business model.
> >
> > Kudos to Adrian and team for continuing to collect the facts and open them
> > up from the public sources, just as Mendeley does themselves, but perhaps
> > sometimes Mendeley does this with more "flair" and "excitement" because of
> > a polished user interface that had a COST to build.
> >
> > On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 5:04 PM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >>
> >> On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 10:49 PM, Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.berkeley.edu>wrote:
> >>
> >>> -- Any content obtained from Mendeley must include proper attribution as
> >>> such. Mendeley brand elements should be placed within close proximity to
> >>> the content, so that the users can easily understand the source. For those
> >>> wishing to brand the content as their own, please contact
> >>> trademarks at mendeley.com with the subject line "SELF BRANDING."
> >>>
> >>> I do not think this community should encourage or condone this sort of
> >>> commercialization of
> >>> biblio data. I would rather see promotion of ideas of provenance of
> >>> biblio data, enforced by
> >>> open community norms, rather than legal attribution requirements. I
> >>> would rather see us promote
> >>> non-commercial alternatives, and create bibliographic stores
> >>> unencumbered with BY requirements,
> >>> but including provenenance assertions whenever possible.
> >>>
> >>> I agree. A year ago Adrian Pohl led the OKF effort to create Principles
> >> for Open Bibliography:
> >> http://openbiblio.net/principles/
> >> We worked hard on this and recommended that licences should be CC0. We
> >> realised that attribution was not appropriate for bibliographic data ,
> >> which we see as FACTUAL data and therefore effectively in the public domain.
> >>
> >> (I hadn't seen the Mendeley "requirement" for "attribution". This is
> >> extremely similar to claiming database rights and IMO has no place. )
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Peter Murray-Rust
> >> Reader in Molecular Informatics
> >> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> >> University of Cambridge
> >> CB2 1EW, UK
> >> +44-1223-763069
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> open-bibliography mailing list
> >> open-bibliography at lists.okfn.org
> >> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-bibliography
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> > --
> > -Thad
> > http://www.freebase.com/view/en/thad_guidry
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > open-bibliography mailing list
> > open-bibliography at lists.okfn.org
> > http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-bibliography
> >
> >