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

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 7:13 AM, Thomas Krichel <krichel at openlib.org> wrote:

>
>   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.
>
> Yes - bibliographicdata is money. smaller publishers sell it to the
aggregators, the aggregators resell it a a huge markup and devlop a
monopoly.

> 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".
>

Imagine if 100 (and possibly 1000) publishers all had their search engines?
It would be almost as useless as institutional repositories. No, they want
a one-stop shop. Maybe Elsevier would like that role, but not - say - the
Chemical Society of Japan. I *can* see the value of domain-specific
repositories - if they add value beyond GoogleText. e.g. searching for data
and equations.

>
> > 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.
>

They don't have the courage. The are the managers of huge amounts of money
but they have no control. They're scared of academics, they're scared of
publishers. I think you're right - libraries will be replaced by
outsourcing and that - unless we can take control - will be *awful*.

>
>   Cheers,
>

yes, we have to be cheerful.

>
>
-- 
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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