[open-bibliography] BibSoup

Mon Jan 23 11:21:24 UTC 2012

I have written two blog posts on BibSoup:
http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/01/22/bibsoup-a-new-open-approach-to-managing-personal-and-group-bibliographies/-
includes videos of the team and an animal explanation of BibSoup
http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/01/23/bibsoup-it%E2%80%99s-here-how-to-create-and-populate-your-own-bibserver/-
a howto for Bibserver

I am really excited about BibSoup (http://bibsoup.net - the team have done
a brilliant job). We have a new concept here - I have tried to explain that
in the first post. It differs from everything else in that it is
deliberately decentralised - anyone can do anything. We do not have the
idea of the one true central bibliography, carefully curated to remove all
warts and blemishes. This is an illusion.

Instead we have local bibliographies. They can be local to:

   - a person
   - a group (this is a real opportunity for us)
   - a department (again a real opportunity)
   - a report (e.g. 7000 citations in IPCC report)
   - a slice across the bibliosphere - an Open journal (e.g. Acta Cryst E),
   a publisher (BioMedCentral or PLoSOne), an abstracter/indexer
   (UK/PubmedCentral), etc. Perhaps filtered by Open rights.
   - current awareness - daily filtering of certian journals or other
   outputs.

I take the view that there will be several providers of large
bibliographies:

   - Open: PubmedCentral, DBLP, RePEC, Arxiv, BNB, many libraries, etc.
   - Free: Mendeley, GoogleScholar, Microsoft Academic Search, Open Library

If Bibserver has API calls to these, then users can link to other opinions
on a given entry. And that's what they are - opinions. There is no absolute
truth. But that helps users clean up their own collections or index their
materials.

We then have the really exciting prospect of thousands, or more, local
collections. The linkage between those will be very interesting - a real
opportunity for bibliographic scholarship. We also have the ability to
extend the Bibserver facets to things like:

   - rights - is it open?
   - links to non-conventional objects. Software, datasets, etc.
   - annotations
   - extraction of material from the resource (text and data mining - where
   allowed)

The real point is that BibSoup is OURS. It's not a walled garden where we
can get "most but not all". Where it might disappear tomorrow. Where we
aren't allowed to build our own index.

I have more ideas than there are current developers. But that's not a
problem. It's Open. All we have to do is get more people to volunteer.

So a real thank-you to the team who have been quietly building this - you
have done a great job.

-- 
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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