Discussions on Fair use

It would be great to have some serious bibliographic data on academic journal articles. Would it be within copyright law to download biblographic data from a proprietary index and then use a custom script to extract and repackege the data into a freebase friendly form and then to bulk upload the lot?

It seems to me that as long as all the information in the index is available freely to be public, this should not be a violation of copyright. Obviously a distinction would have to be made between those indexes which simply provide publically available bibliographic data and those which actually generate content that could be considered proprietary (e.g., an index which  provides an abstracting service).

 Would any copyright experts care to weigh in on this?