Re: Scientometric OAI Search Engines

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2005 23:18:52 +0000

You can't find what ain't there. For some reason some in the library
community keep thinking the accessibility problem is the findability
problem. It's not. But let's wait to discuss whether it's suitably
findable till the day it's all safely up there. Right now, only 15% of it
is, and that's hardly worth honing up high-tech search tools for...

Stevan Harnad

P.S. the problem is not classifying or preserving it either: It's getting
it up there, i.e., keystrokes (and keystroke policies)...

On Mon, 26 Dec 2005, David Goodman wrote:

> Open Access implies more than the removal of toll barriers
> and other physical restrictions (such as being open to a particular
> community only). It also requires intellectual access in the
> sense in which Stevan as well as most librarians use the term:
> You need to be able to locate a known article.
>
> I've heard people call this aspect "findability."
> The available le search engines are of some but limited use, and
> part of this limit is the failure of repositories to post harvestable metadata according to the now standard definition. We also need better search engines, but this is the sort of project many people like to work on, and they will come.
>
> A related aspect can e called "linkability." One has to be able
> to link to the OA material, both from other OA material, and
> standard indexes, and even toll access versions of articles.
> The likes from TA materials will be the most difficulty,
> because we can not control or specify what TA providers do.
>
> If I can be forgiven for speaking of PMC in a positive tone, one of its strengths was the association of the OA and the TA versions of articles.
>
> For sometime, some OA advocates may have paid insufficient
> attention to these librarian-type concerns, and I am glad they
> now are doing so. In the present state, students have major problems with findability in the most basic sense. With experience, one
> learns what is likely to be available, but OA should be removing
> barriers, not creating them.
>
> Dr. David Goodman
> Associate Professor
> Palmer School of Library and Information Science
> Long Island University
> dgoodman_at_liu.edu
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of Rick Anderson
> Sent: Fri 12/16/2005 6:05 PM
> To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_listserver.sigmaxi.org
> Subject: Re: Scientometric OAI Search Engines
>
> . ..
> > (4) Self-archiving mandates require self-archiving in an OAI-compliant
> > Institutional (or Central) Repository (Archive) -- not just on an
> > arbitrary website. All OAI-compliant archives will be harvested by
> > OAIster (and probably also google scholar).
> >
> > (5) For 100% OA self-archiving, read "100% OA self-archiving in OAI
> > IRs or CRs." (OAI-compliance was already part of the 2001 BOAI
> > definition of OA!)
>
> But I think this brings us back to my original point, Stevan, which is
> that you are not the Official Definer of OA. Even the Budapest language
> is only one of several competing definitions. Yes, if the whole world
> defined OA exactly the same way you do, and if everyone complied with
> its requirements, then OA would mean "universally and easily
> accessible." ...
>
>
> ----
> Rick Anderson
> Dir. of Resource Acquisition
> University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
> (775) 784-6500 x273
> rickand_at_unr.edu
>
>
>
Received on Tue Dec 27 2005 - 03:00:47 GMT