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

Sat Jan 19 07:13:48 UTC 2013

  Peter Murray-Rust writes

> I actually suspect that publishers do not want open bibdata.

  So do I. As long as the biggest one, Elsevier, runs a business of
  selling metadata through Scopus, why would they give that data away?
  Actually they do give some to RePEc but I am told we are the only
  ones they give any of their metadata to and it does not contain
  abstracts. This data still has commercial value.  Case in point: the
  CEO of a company in the scholarly communications field confided to
  me that his company spends a lot of money for metadata from a
  medium-sized society publisher.

> They want Google to index it for them.

  I am not so sure about this. I suspect the publishers would rather
  have their own engines, but they don't have a technology anywhere
  near Google's, so I think it's more of a case of "if you can't
  beat them, join them". 

> If Elsevier tell you they are happy to give PeterMR their bib data
> for his own unrestricted use I'd be amazed.

  So would I!

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

  Absolutely!

> 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.

  They don't have the resources. They spend all their resource on
  toll-gated publishers. Thus they are outsourcing themselves to
  death.

  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel                    http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                                      http://authorprofile.org/pkr1
                                               skype: thomaskrichel