Can I collect meta information on papers and put this online?

Question

For my thesis I have had to go through many different sources to find relevant literature. I want to share my reading list with others to make it easier for people who want to study the same topic to find relevant information. I have set up a little database with meta info (title / journal / author / date / abstract). My idea is to put this online so others can freely browse this. Is there any copyright issue (or otherwise important issue) to take into account? Can I put the abstracts online as well?

Each paper links to the journal's official website and I did not put any actual paper or PDF online.

Answer 1

With the hopefully obvious caveat that I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice: at least in the US, this is probably fine. Copyright law (17 USC § 102) applies to "original works of authorship," not to ideas, and I think everyone would agree the metadata of an article's publication (including journal name, author, and date) fall in the latter category, not the former. Otherwise the whole system of academic citation would be untenable!

The title and abstract, on the other hand, are content created by the articles' authors and are protected by copyright law, but I think it's quite likely that fair use (17 USC § 107) protects you from being held liable for using them in the manner you describe. With reference to the four conditions to be considered when determining fair use:

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

You say it's a free, noncommercial endeavor, so that works in your favor

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

It's an academic article; the whole purpose of its existence is to be widely disseminated

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole

The title and abstract are a small part of the work

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work

Using the title and abstract in a database like this will more likely increase the market for the original paper than decrease it (which is in fact the entire point of having an abstract)

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In fact, you would hardly be the first person to do something like this. In high energy physics, INSPIRE already aggregates abstracts and metadata from nearly all published papers.

Answer 2

Disclaimer: The following is not legal advice.

As the copyright laws of many countries may apply, you would have to check your projects compatibility with each of them, which you might consider a disproportional amount of work. However, there is a minimum allowance any country’s copyright laws have to make to be any reasonable (e.g., without which most journalism would be illegal). Assuming these, one can make the following thoughts:

There are only two things, to which copyright laws will apply: The title and the abstract. Everything else would at least fail to be over the threshold of originality (and probably many other criterions).

Now, a reasonable copyright law has to have some mechanism that allows for short quotations: In the U.S. this would be covered by fair use and maybe something else; Germany has a special paragraph for quotations, etc. However, at least in some countries, if not all, there are no clear legal limits regarding the circumstances and length of a quotation – e.g., the U.S. fair use is “only” likely to be in your favour as explained by David Z. While the title can be safely assumed to be legal to quote, the abstract is in this grey area (under the above assumptions).

Hence I would refrain from publishing the abstracts (even more so, as they are usually freely available on the Journal’s home page, which you can link).

Answer 3

Most publishers has a set, automatic way to get permissions to republish figures, tables, parts of text etc and also a rather elaborate copyright section. To study these I think the second best thing after taking the opinion of a lawyer. Note, they can vary publisher by publisher.

In my experience, journals are often broadcast abstracts eg in RSS feeds with a copyright tag, so I guess they consider it copyrighted but more or less sharable content.

Answer 4

There's generally no copyright issue. You're giving fair credit assignment. Abstracts should be considered "marketing material" -- freely publishable (with proper references), as you're helping the author(s) as much as yourself.