How to share buildable LaTeX source when the bibliography is not accessible to all parties?

Question

We write scientific papers with contributing authors in multiple companies. My company maintains a bibliography file which provides all references and which resides inside our company network and is inaccessible to the outside. The LaTeX source resides in an SVN repos available to all contributors.

Or in other words: LaTeX sources A are public. Large bibliography file B is located privately. The information contained is not confidential, though, and could be shared. As long as we don't start maintaining multiple files. When I edit and build, I have A and B available and can build the document. But a coauthor from another company has only A available and cannot build.

What options exist to share a self-contained buildable set of files among all authors? Solutions can be changes in build and files or system architecture, too.

Ideas from my side:

• Current option: Share the .bbl file. But coauthors complain that this causes problems sometimes. What problems could there be? Will this file be overwritten with an empty file when no .bib is present?
• A script that copies the current .bib to the public SVN everytime I build. But I don't know how that could be scripted.

But maybe there are alternatives I haven't thought about.

Answer 1

Since quite recently, biblatex has a new command for including bibliographies, \addbibresource, which supports remote access. The biblatex manual shows an example

\addbibresource[location=remote]{ftp://192.168.1.57/~user/file.bib}

I also use bibliography management software, with popular alternatives such as mendeley and zotero, and use it to share some collections with my coworkers.

Answer 2

My recommendation is to follow your suggestion:

Current option: Share the .bbl file. But coauthors complain that this causes problems sometimes. What problems could there be? Will this file be overwritten with an empty file when no .bib is present?

If you do this by cutting and pasting the .bbl file in place into the main Latex source (that is, delete the \bibliography{bibfile} and insert the contents of the .bbl file at that point), then it generally reduces problems, at least from the point of view of editing that one document. There are some issues, however:

1. The link between the document's bibliography and the repository is broken. The most important consequence of this is that any corrections to the imported bibliography will need to be made separately to the repository.
2. If you want to add new bibliographic items, doing so using Bibtex becomes more complex. Similarly the rare case of wanting to change citation style becomes somewhat more tricky as well.

Neither of these issues are particularly troublesome. Your other suggestion,

A script that copies the current .bib to the public SVN everytime I build. But I don't know how that could be scripted.

reduces both of these issues, but at the expense of creating new problems and requiring you to solve a nontrivial implementation problem.

The advantages of incorporating a .bbl file into the main document are:

1. There is no parallel problem of keeping the current Latex document and current .bib file up to date. Up-to-dateness being the principal source of difficulty in collaborative editing (and one that is almost completely solved if everyone uses a DVCS like git), this is an important advantage. I try to ensure that in my editing work with clients that there is only one file to be edited per assignment because of the reliability with which not doing so causes difficulties.
2. Bibtex has problems representing what Chicago calls "informal sources", that is, sources that do not have ISBN or ISSN numbers. You can work around these issues if you can edit the output of Bibtex.
3. It is more convenient to edit the reference list in the order in appears in the output than to go hunting about a .bib file. Most reference lists have errors in them ; the likelihood of these errors increases quite a bit if the author has high confidence in the quality of the bibliographic database they are based on.