[open-bibliography] getting a personal bib library out

Sun Feb 5 23:09:35 UTC 2012

Mark MacGillivray <mark at odaesa.com> wrote:

> You can put license information into your bibjson, but there is not a
> corresponding field in bibtex that I know of, so it could not go in
> there. 

Sure it can. BibTeX is extensible, and you just add a licence field or fields.
This reminds me of a question I have about  http://bibjson.org/
In the proposed licence BibJSON

{
    "license": [
        {
            "type": "copyheart",
            "url": "http://copyheart.org/manifesto/",
            "description": "A great license",
            "jurisdiction": "universal"
        }
    ]
}
is it intended that this is the license of the document that the record is about, or the
license of the record itself? This is not obvious without some documentation/convention. 
Now that Mendeley and others are slapping licenses on biblio records, this is a serious issue.

> You would therefore have to write the bibjson manually and push from there. We will be adding edit soon though, so you could add
> license info then.

I think we should tolerate obvious BibTeX equivalents of the above JSON like

license_type = copyheart,
license_url = http://copyheart.org/manifesto/,
...

or to be more pedantic e.g.

license_type = ....
license_url = ....

for the  original doc and

self_license_type = ....
self_license_url = ....

for the biblio record itself. We need some such convention in the BibJSON too.

> > 2) There was mention of adding an appropriate field to EACH bibtex
> > entry with the relevant license information. Is this in fact desirable,
> > or overkill, and why?
> You could put it on the record or on the collection if you want to.

I think a one-line indication of license just pointing to a license url in each record would be good. 
Could OKF support suitable stable urls with PD license assertions for biblio data, both records and collections?

--Jim