Re: Re: Medline abstracts copyrighted or not?

I actually got curious about this and looked up some articles in Medline and compared them to the digital version of the print. All of the abstracts that I encountered for articles originally published in English were identical to the abstract included in the article*, and presumably written by the article author. The ones that I encountered for foreign language articles (which often don't have an abstract in Medline) were not from the original article, and therefore would have been translated by Medline staff, or written by Medline staff, presumably. However, there was nothing that I could see in the display of the Medline citation that would let you know the authorship of the abstract. I have seen other databases that note whether the abstract is an "author abstract" or was written by the indexing company. Those databases generally have an interest in owning the abstract because the copyright claim is one of their ways of trying to limit downloading and re-use of their citation. Abstracts written by Medline staff, being from the National Library of Medicine, would probably fall under the federal government's public domain status. Still, it would be a service to users to distinguish between these two cases in the database.

kc
*Not at all a scientific study, so I can't and won't say that all of the abstracts for English language articles are from the article itself.

Agenbroad, James (Civ,ARL/CISD) wrote:

>It seems to me that the operative question is: "Who exactly wrote these
>abstracts?" If they were written by NLM employees (not contractors)
>then they are "works of the United States Government", and not subject
>to copyright in the U.S. If, as is often the case with scientific
>journals, they were written by the article authors than they are almost
>certainly covered by the copyright assignment to the journal in
>question. Would it be possible for you to link to the abstracts within
>pubmed?
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: CNI-COPYRIGHT -- Copyright & Intellectual Property
>[mailto:CNI-COPYRIGHT[_at_]cni.org] On Behalf Of Joan .
>Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2005 4:55 PM
>To: CNI-COPYRIGHT -- Copyright & Intellectual Property
>Subject: [CNI-(C)] Medline abstracts copyrighted or not?
>
>
>I have read the copyright information through Pubmed and I am not clear
>on
>the issue of fair use. If I do a search on Pubmed and download the
>citations and abstracts (when available) for further review to determine
>
>which references would be worth purchasing the full text article, is
>downloading those abstracts considered fair use as long as I include all
>
>identifying information to acknowledge the NLM?
>
>They state ""Government information at NLM Web sites is in the public
>domain. Public domain information may be freely distributed and copied,
>but
>it is requested that in any subsequent use the National Library of
>Medicine
>(NLM) be given appropriate acknowledgement."
>
>I cannot imagine locating hundreds of abstracts and need to request
>permission for every author to download those abstracts for review
>and/or to
>share them with a colleague to decide which full text articles to
>purchase.
>It seems to me that this should be considered fair use for research
>purposes
>but I would be wrong since it would part of business which is profit.
>
>Thank you for feedback.
>
>Joan
>
>_________________________________________________________________
>Don't just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
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>
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