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

Karen Coyle kcoyle at kcoyle.net
Sat Jan 19 15:51:32 UTC 2013


List of publishers (not complete) who make their bib records available 
for free downloading:

http://roytennant.com/proto/onix/

On 1/19/13 12:52 AM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 7:13 AM, Thomas Krichel <krichel at openlib.org
> <mailto: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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-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet




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