Jim Pitman: Position Statement
I agree strongly with the general principles outlined by Ulf Rehmann in his position statement. In response to Ulf's request for recommendations concerning the issue of copyright and maintenance of digital resources, to encourage the distribution of data and the mirroring at many places, I propose the following points:
- all metadata associated with the DML should be made available in bulk with an explicit open license, such as Creative Commons CC0, or the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL), according to the Principles on Open Bibliographic Data
- to the greatest extent possible, all full text associated with the DML should be made available with an open license such as CC BY which allows reprocessing of the data for purposes such as text mining and topic navigation without requiring permission of the original copyright holder
To encourage development of an additional open layers of information about the mathematical literature, such as citation indexes, collaboration graphs, topic navigation tools, collected and selected works, DML participants should cooperate to establish and promote simple metadata standards to facilitate the tagging of mathematical documents by subject classifications, most obviously MSC2010, but also other classifications better suited to historical articles, as well as author identifiers and indicators of citation relations. The DML culture should insist that these metadata enhancements be openly licensed by their providers, rather than considered proprietary as is the present custom of MathSciNet and Zentralblatt.
For background, further discussion and references, see
- Jim Pitman. Author Identity and Open Bibliography IMS Bulletin Online. April 2012
- Richard Jones, Mark MacGillivray, Peter Murray-Rust, Jim Pitman, Peter Sefton, Ben O'Steen and William Waites. Open Bibliography for Science, Technology, and Medicine. Journal of Cheminformatics 2011, 3:47 doi:10.1186/1758-2946-3-47
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