Carles, Have you heard back anything from CAS or CASSI about the legality of compiling abbreviation lists in JSON for re-distribution?
I've been looking around for different styles that require abbreviations and I'm not coming across that many different abbreviation lists. Most require LTWA, some reference MEDLINE/Index Medicus, which is essentially LTWA with a few changes. Both of those are not restricted AFAIK and CSL could easily distribute them. However, ACS journals refer to CASSI (I actually thought CAS was essentially the same list), which, as Carles points out is copyrighted and their terms of use pretty clearly state that you cannot compile the abbreviations into a large list for distribution. It's a bit odd that they would be this restrictive, considering that access to CASSI is free. If we can't compile it into a JSON file, I figured that the reference managers could have users click buttons to "automatically" retrieve abbreviations for the journals in their libraries. That seems to be ok with their ToS. http://www.library.illinois.edu/biotech/j-abbrev.html suggests that CASSI is also based on LTWA, but obviously, like with MEDLINE, there may be some corrections that need to be accounted for. I also came across an abbreviation list used by Society for Biblical Studies. It's published in The SBL Handbook of Style (section 8.4.1) and is obviously copyrighted. Their copyright notice (http://www.sbl-site.org/publications/publishing_fairuse.aspx), however, does not seem very restrictive and perhaps they would grant rights to redistribute the list if inquired (I haven't yet). http://www.library.illinois.edu/biotech/j-abbrev.html also mentions BIOSIS and a couple other lists (they all seem to be LTWA-based), but I have not found any styles that reference these. Do you guys know if they are actually used? There's also the WoS list http://images.webofknowledge.com/WOK46/help/WOS/A_abrvjt.html but again, I haven't seen a style that uses it. Finally, I know that Bluebook has a bunch of abbreviation lists, but they are copyrighted and, as Frank has discovered, Bluebook holds on to their copyright very tightly. ALWD may also have abbreviations, but I don't have access to either of the manuals, so I can't comment exactly. So basically, my concern is that, with the exception of MEDLINE and LTWA, all the other lists are copyrighted, which essentially puts a stop to CSL distributing them. I had started writing a formal specification for abbreviation lists (https://gist.github.com/aurimasv/6878178). The gist of it is that managing the lists and generating abbreviations would be left up to the reference manager. CSL would have been the source of the actual lists, but considering the above, perhaps it's best to leave obtaining/generating the lists up to the reference managers as well. CSL would simply identify the list that needs to be used for a style (the list identifiers would have to be agreed upon), the CSL processor would request the reference manager to generate an abbreviation for a particular field given an abbreviation list ID (falling back to unabbreviated form otherwise), and the rest would be left up to the reference managers to implement as they see fit. I'd love to have this subject finalized as soon as possible, so that we can properly implement abbreviation lists in Zotero. Thanks for your input. Aurimas. -- View this message in context: http://xbiblio-devel.2463403.n2.nabble.com/Journal-Abbreviations-file-tp7578617p7578807.html Sent from the xbiblio-devel mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60135031&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ xbiblio-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xbiblio-devel
