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Weekly News Digest
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June 28, 2022 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today.
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NISO's Todd Carpenter Writes About OCLC-Clarivate Lawsuit
Todd Carpenter, executive director of NISO (National Information Standards Organization), writes the following in “Let the Metadata Wars Begin” on The Scholarly Kitchen blog:OCLC claims, reasonably, that it has invested millions of dollars in working with librarians and publishers to build and license as comprehensive a worldwide catalog as possible. It regularly enhances the quality of its records through a variety of approaches. This has benefited the vast majority of libraries and also OCLC’s bottom line. … Earlier this year, Clarivate quietly announced a new product, MetaDoor, which is described as an open platform for sharing cataloging records. … In trying to recruit members to use the new service and be early adopters, Clarivate has caught the attention of OCLC, who views this new product as an obvious competitor to its flagship WorldCat service. Challenging both the source of the data in MetaDoor and its efforts to recruit participants in this data-sharing ecosystem—in breach of their agreements with OCLC—last week OCLC filed a lawsuit in Ohio courts against Clarivate and its operating units claiming predatory market behavior and tortious interference in OCLC’s contracts with its member organizations. … To the core claim of OCLC, it would strike me as odd if Clarivate wouldn’t be scrupulous in where it would be gathering data from, since much of the core of this data is freely available as linked data, or from publisher’s feeds, or other resources. However, in an environment of machine crawling, haphazard sharing, and a world of many billions of records, errors are bound to happen. Clarivate certainly would have the burden of ensuring it is not inappropriately republishing licensed data, in much the same way it shouldn’t be republishing text content from other publishers in its products, i.e., that they know where they were gathering data from and what rights are associated with it. Of course, if there is proof to the contrary, then OCLC most certainly has a case in the United States. For more information, read the blog post.
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Brandi Scardilli
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