So the ridiculous nuisance suit that Thomson Reuters filed against GMU has been dismissed. Am curious to learn the precise details of the ruling, but those should be available soon enough.
In related news, I’d like to encourage people to do as one of the commenters to this story did; take what you would normally pay for an Endnote upgrade, and donate it to the CHNM instead.
I recently learned that, as part of their lawsuit regarding Zotero, Thomson Reuters has successfully forced GMU to release the contact information for all 286 people who have SVN and Trac accounts at zotero.org.
I don’t personally care, because I’m sure these lawyers already know my name. But this seems nothing more than yet more thuggish intimidation.
Dan Cohen has a link to an official comment from GMU on the Thomson Reuters lawsuit, the most choice two sentences being:
CHNM announces that it has re-released the full functionality of Zotero 1.5 Sync Review to its users and the open source community. As part of its formal response to this legal action, Mason will also not renew its site license for EndNote.So they’re not backing down from the belief that they are within their rights to release the functionality to read Endnote style files, and they’re dropping their site license in response to the heavy-handed lawsuit. Excellent!
Of course, this still isn’t anything but a stop gap solution until we manage to have better CSL creation and editing.
Along with Thomson Reuters’ lawsuit against GMU/Zotero, they’ve also sought to close down access to their style files. They have done this by slapping a terms of use agreement on their own online style archive. But, some Endnote users have asked, what does this mean for them sharing their styles?
We have an answer:
It has always been and continues to be our policy that licensed EndNote individual and institutional customers are free to customize and share style (.ens), database (.enl & .enlx), filter (.enf), and connection (.enz) EndNote files created using EndNote with other licensed EndNote users for use solely in conjunction with the Software.
Jason Rollins, EndNote Product Development
So, someone asks in reply, what does this really mean?
Just for clarification: would these limitations apply not only to files that were originally distributed by EndNote, but also to files that are created in EndNote from scratch? I can’t find anything in my current EULA that would limit my rights for such files and no other software I have seems to make these claims. If I write a paper in Word, Microsoft doesn’t limit my distribution rights of that file.
Answer, from Thomson Reuters’ alternative universe:
Just to be completely clear, it has never been possible to create an EndNote Bibliographic Output Style file (.ens) file “from scratch”. When one creates a new .ens file from within EndNote, this is actually a modification of a file template that contains thousands of characters of code that defines many default and essential characterics of the file and its interaction with other components of the overall EndNote application.
Wow; this is really breathtaking! I really can’t believe they actually want to claim that they own ALL Endnote style files and can constrain how they’re used! Nevermind that any file, of any format, is going to contain many default and essential characteristics of the file and its interaction with other components
; it’s true of a Word template file, or some database, or whatever.
This is the most ridiculous IP claim I’ve seen in a long while. I hope some of the legal blogs that have been following this manage to pick this up and analyze it from a more formal legal perspective.
One of what I hope is just the beginning of institutional backlash against Thomson’s suit against GMU is that institutions’ decision to drop Endnote. As they announced:
With litigation pending between Thomson and Mason, we’re letting our campus site license for EndNote expire at the end of November. When it lapses, any copy of EndNote that was downloaded and installed under the terms of that license will have to be uninstalled and removed.
They’ve also setup a nice website for current Endnote users to help with their migration to Zotero.
Lawsuit; (a) definition:
What companies often do to smaller competitors when they fear they otherwise cannot compete on the merits of their products.
Make no mistake, this is a nuisance lawsuit designed to intimidate. To quote from the complaint:
A significant and highly touted feature of the new beta version of Zotero, however, is its ability to convert - in direct violation of the License Agreement - Thomson’s 3,500 plus proprietary .ens style files within the EndNote Software into free, open source, easily distributable Zotero .csl files.
So what are they complaining about here?
GMU reverse engineered Reuters’ EndNote software to create Zotero.They cannot possibly demonstrate any evidence to support this claim, as it is not true. What Zotero does in order to read Endnote style files is no different than what, say, OpenOffice.org does to read Microsoft Word binary files. All the Zotero team did was figure out how to map the style files to Zotero internal style structure, which has no connection to Endnote, but is in fact based on development work on CSL. Thomson’s complaint, then, has the same merit as if Microsoft were to sue OpenOffice.org for its ability to read .doc files.
It is my hope that individuals and institutions see this lawsuit for what it is, and that it becomes yet another reason to in fact support Zotero (and other free solutions) and move away from Endnote. It is also my hope that Zotero and George Mason are not intimidated by this, and that they might see some help on the legal front to fight it.
Somehow I stumbled on 2collab, a new social bookmarking site for scholars. From the about page of their website:
2collab is a social bookmarking site where you can store and organize your favorite internet resources – such as blogs, websites, research articles, and more. Then, in private or public groups you can decide to share your bookmarks with others – stimulating debate and discussion. Members of groups can evaluate these resources (by rating bookmarks, tagging and adding comments), or add their own bookmarks. You can browse public groups and bookmarks, but must register (your name and email address) to access the full functionality – such as creating groups, adding comments, and adding bookmarks.
FWIW, I haven’t the faintest interest in this service. It’s a publishsr-led effort, with no obvious open source development model (e.g. it is not free software), and some worrying terms and conditions. I’d urge potential users and developers caution in supporting it. There are better alternatives. If you’re looking forward to the next generation of such tools designed by and for scholars rather than publishers, look for Zotero 2.0. If you’re looking for a social bookmarking site now look into CiteULike or Connotea.
Those of us working on CSL have been talking for awhile about realizing a vision: one in which users never again have to worry about the arcane details of citation styles, and where users can seamlessly access new styles from a diversity of online locations. So imagine two use cases. First:
Jane Doe is a researcher at the University of Gotham. She and her team decide they’d like to submit an article manuscript to the Journal of Nuclear Physics. She thus goes to the journal site. Rather than reading through the style guide for authors, she instead clicks a link. The style information for the journal is loaded into her citation processing software (in this case Zotero, but it could be any software). If the journal makes any corrections or changes to the style, the software transparently updates it.
Second:
John Smith is a graduate student in philosophy. He comes across a repository that aggregates styles from the majority of relevant journals. The main web page for the repository lists a variety of categories. John clicks the “subscribe” links next to his area of interest, and his citation software makes that list of styles available for his use. Those styles he activates are transparently updated as they are improved.
Zotero has made the first step towards this vision by hosting a CSL repository. So the styles are all now freely available for anyone to download. More importantly, each style has a URI id, which resolves to the location of the file. This means any tool, knowing the id for that style, can load it for use in formatting. Moreover, once Zotero releases 1.0.2, Zotero users will be able to click on the “install” link beside each style, and it will be available for immediate use.
A second related development is that people are really stepping up to help make this vision happen. The award for best contributor of late definitely has to go Julian Onions, who has been tirelessly doing a lot of the work I should have done over the past year. As a result, we now have a pretty good start of documentation for CSL, and a decent and growing collection of styles.
Finally, in other news, another contributor at the xbib project is working on fleshing out a Ruby implementation of a CSL engine and bibliographic ontology object model, and Peter Hedlund has been working on a CSL editing application.
Now just imagine if a few more people followed these people’s lead!
A few weeks back, I came across a review of Zotero. In the context of this very positive review, I came across the following comment:
For Scott, who is not affiliated with an academic institution, Zotero makes a lot of sense because it’s free.
But many IHE readers are affiliated with a college or university. Those folks may want to find out if their library has RefWorks. It’s available free of charge to anyone at the institution — and if you ever leave you can take all of your citations with you.
I won’t turn this comment into an ad for Refworks, which to my way of thinking, does all that Zotero does and more (for example, integrating your citations from your personal database directly into your word documents in any of dozens of citation formats — and with RefShare — scholars or students in a class can start to share their references ). I’ll just suggest that like many other great library resources that are made available to the campus community, faculty should not overlook them — and they should be advocates for encouraging their students to use them as well.
What struck me as odd is that this was not, as I first suspected, a post from a RefWorks representative. That would make some sense. Rather it was from one Steven Bell, who lists himself as “associate university librarian at temple u.” Hmmm …
In a followup, I proceeded to point out some factual errors and differences of opinion on the content of Steven’s comment. I also challenged libraries for spending large licensing fees for what is an inferior product when even a portion of those fees could be directed to Zotero. As I wrote:
Universities spend a lot of money for those licenses. Imagine if instead they invested in truly free solutions like Zotero (which I personally believe is superior to RefWorks in virtually every way; the only exception currently being the lack of server support)?
I then came across an even more bizarre comment from one H. Stephen McMinn:
I was going to enter the comment area and reply to the potential pros and cons of various bibliographic management software, but the level of discourse has discouraged me from even considering it. Zotero has some fine features which other bibliographic management software packages don’t but it also doesn’t have the functionality of others. I really don’t see the need to blast someone because he stated something is free when it is in fact subsidized by the university so it appears free to university community. Can’t we all get along?
Huh? So I was curious: is this another librarian sensitive to critique of vendor products? Well, it turns out, apparently yes!
So I’m just left scratching my head at this. Why on earth would librarians be defending costly, limited and closed solutions and subtly digging a project that is arguably better, certainly free, and developed by a group of scholars? It made no sense!
But I just came across another post that helps clarify what I would call the dysfunctional organizational politics of these positions. In Zotero proselytizing, a library information sciences student observes the following:
I don’t talk about Zotero too much at work because we subscribe to, and are busy promoting- RefWorks. I feel sorta like a traitor. But in my own research, Zotero has been an absolute godsend. I truly believe students are better off using Zotero, because they can store, annotate, and, if they install on a portable version of Firefox as I have, take their database anywhere, even places without an internet connection. Not to mention, when they graduate, they can take all their research with them and not have to pay $100 a year.
Ah ha! This starts to give some insight. Sounds a little like what I imagine CIA employees skeptical of the “slam dunk” intelligence on Iraq’s WMDs must have felt like before the invasion!
I know from talking to library IT people that most are really psyched about Zotero. Many of them promote Zotero on their blogs, or use it for their own research, and some even hack on it. And clearly library people get the useful innovations that Zotero brings to their users.
But what about this business of feeling like “a traitor” for not promoting the party line proprietary solution? It’s really a shame, since it seems that the only thing this student is betraying in promoting Zotero is a rather narrow-minded organizational group think; not their end users.
Aside: it occurs to me that when I use the term “free” in these contexts it may be a little unclear exactly what I mean. I mean it in the free as in free speech tradition; not simply that it is cost-free.
I don’t think many people realize how crucial bibliographic data is to a scholar. A rather intense frustration can result from feeling that such crucial data is locked-in to closed products that have a history of glacial innovation. A lot of my interest in data and metadata modeling really comes from having been unable to represent a lot of my data in applications like Endnote and RefWorks, and not having any faith its developers would improve their applications to accommodate my needs. With Zotero, by contrast, I know people like Dan Cohen have gone through similar frustrations, and that they will always strive to create a better tool regardless of market considerations. I am also confident that whatever work I directly or indirectly put into Zotero will have positive impacts beyond Zotero.
I don’t yet know what to make of Twine, but the Talis blog has a short overview with a number of links.
Twine seems to be a practical answer to the question of what semantic web technologies can add to the social networking experience. This overview explains among other things that:
The interface also includes a tag cloud for quick reference. Radar Networks’ platform has digested Wikipedia as part of its underlying structure, and has 300,000 concepts in the system.
So it seems that this might be a smarter and more open alternative to something like Facebook (which I still don’t get), but which is deeply and richly integrated into the web, and no doubt the emerging web of data. The links of the tagging infrastructure to Wikipedia is just a simple, but practical, example of this. I’ll be interested to see what the Zotero guys think of this as they work on their server and social networking stuff.
update: Tim O’Reilly explains Twine like so:
Underlying twine is Radar’s semantic engine, trained to do what is called entity extraction from documents. Put in plain language, the semantic engine auto-tags each document, turning each entity into what looks like a web link as well as a tag in the sidebar. Type a note in twine, and it picks out all of the people, places, companies, books, and other types of information contained in the note, separating them out by type.
Also, Shelley Powers has a really good point on a potential drawback:
… the semantic web means the web in the wild, not centralized in a specific tool or environment. If this becomes a “Facebook and Wikipedia mashup”, it might be successful, and it might be semantic, but it isn’t the web. The whole point of the semantic web technologies is for each of us to annotate our data, wherever we are, regardless of tool, and begin to really drive out the tiny threads of true meaning on a global scale. If we have to leave our places where we’re at and go elsewhere, this seems to create a disconnect, right from the start. I have this same quibble with the other ‘mainstream applications using semantic web technologies’, so the concern isn’t targeted specifically at Twine.
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