[open-bibliography] getting a personal bib library out

[Jim Pitman]

Mark MacGillivray <mark at odaesa.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 11:09 PM, Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> > This reminds me of a question I have about  http://bibjson.org/
> > In the proposed licence BibJSON
> > 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.
>
> Given that we wrote the principles last year and link to them from the
> front, our entire point is that bib metadata are facts. If we stick
> licenses on them, they will appear licensable. so the license is about whatever the record is about.

We cannot expect all BibJSON users to follow this chain of reasoning. We must be explicit about it in the spec.

> > I think we should tolerate obvious BibTeX equivalents of the above JSON like
> This would require ongoing maintenance of the bibtex parser. We are
> supposed to be trying to move away from bibtex, not support it indefintely.

Right. But if we have users who are stuck using BibTeX or other tools to maintain their collections, we will need to
support their practices until good JSON management tools are available, and they are not yet.

> > 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?
> Are you saying we should change bibjson so that license is just a string then?
Just a url, yes, for the license assertion on the biblio record, that might be useful.
Biblio records may carry baggage with them which is licensable or copyrightable even if the basic metadata are not.
Especially, I think we should consider a practice of attaching abstracts and keywords or subject tags, even if taken from
a publisher's site, with a claim of "fair use" by US copyright doctrine.
This may be something for the broader list, not just the dev list.
--Jim

>
>
> Mark