Increased Role of Open Bibliographic Data in the Context of Restricted Access to Proprietary Information Systems

The paper presents a review of function capabilities and coverage of sources in open bibliographic databases that can be useful in the limited access to proprietary information systems. Databases were primarily evaluated with regard to their usefulness for researchers and research libraries who solve the problems of information and patent search, bibliometric assessment of authors, promotion of papers in international information space, searching collaborators or conducting bibliometric studies. We focused on multidisciplinary databases covering wide range of international scientific literature. Based on our own experience and literature review, we concluded on possibility in principle to solve almost all information-retrieval and bibliometric tasks using current open bibliographic databases and their web-tools. Furthermore, large volumes of metadata are now regarded as a basic and non-unique feature of different databases, while analytical characteristics are taking centre stage.