[open-bibliography] Inviting community engagement on building a bibliographic roadmap

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 4:30 PM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle at kcoyle.net> wrote:

>
> I actually think that we do have a "business case" for free bib data, if
> not more than one. Publishers definitely do, since the data that they
> provide for free advertises their product.


And unfortunately some publishers don't as they see bibdata as something
they possess and to be controlled and sold. Do you have any concrete
evidence that publishers want to make their bib data Open?  If publishers
seriously wanted free bib data then maybe they would have reacted more
positively to our Open Bibliographic principles.

I actually suspect that publishers do not want open bibdata. They want
Google to index it for them. If Elsevier tell you they are happy to give
PeterMR their bib data for his own unrestricted use I'd be amazed.


> Libraries do because they share bib data, thus saving themselves a great
> deal of repetitive effort. An in essence, everyone who provides citations
> or a bibliography with their work is giving the world free bib data.


Scholars create bibliographies in scholarly publication and if these
"belong" to closed publishers they claim the copyright on them.

We just haven't yet done a good job of capturing all of this data together
> in a useful way.
>

I agree. Some of us are trying, with little/no funding, to scrape the
public web and to build shared resources. But it is often a long slog to
create such bottom-up data.  And maybe this is something that libraries
could put some effort into.

<end of mild rant>

P.


-- 
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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