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Some comments to Stevans explanations about OpenDOAR:
In general what we would like to accomplish by building the OpenDOAR service is:
1. Make a comprensive overview of repositories with original content ^Ö in the OAI terminology: data providers. By original content I mean documents (and later other digital objects) deposited in institutional or subject based repositories. Therefore we do not include for instance journals as such, neither do we include data from the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org). As well we do not include second layer services or collections of links to free resources etc.
2. Make incentives for such repositories to develop their services ^Ö e.g. ability to provide metadata sets based on full text or not full text, metadata sets based on subject and document type.
3. Provide services for potential service providers ^Ö e.g. libraries, research information support services etc. ^Ö to create services based on the contents of the repositories and by means of OAI-harvesting of the various sets of metadata.
I disagree with Stevan: I think that a number of service providers (for instance libraries at research centers or universities) would like to harvest exactly the content of interest for their researchers and students ^Ö for instance pre/postprints and dissertations in economics but not thesis in economics etc. A significant proportion of research institutions and universities are not covering all scientific disciplines. Therefore if a service provider wants to integrate open accessible scientific content with toll-access journal content in their service (thus increasing the visibility of the open access content!) a service like OpenDOAR would make a lot of sense and provide a lot of value for end users of those institutions.
Thus the OpenDOAR is not primarily a service for end users but more so for service providers.
The work with OpenDOAR is still in its early stages. So far we have drawn on a number of sources (^Ólists^Ô) in order to create the very first list, which will be extended in numbers and in functionality in the coming months.
For instance: Based on the stuff in ROAR we could include only a proportion of the sites in ROAR ^Ö a number of the sites in ROAR are not original material, there are journals, dead URL´s etc.
OAIster as well is a valuable resource, but even OAIster contains sources of various kinds.
We want to make a ^Óclean^Ô service ^Ö only first layer repositories (among other other things to reduce duplicates, redundancy etc.) and hopefully inspiring and make incentives for repository managers to offer metadata harvesting on a more detailed level - that is: improving the quality and functionality of repositories.
It is our ambition to add more functionality to OpenDOAR such as the ones Stevan mentions, but even other functionality is in the pipeline.
I agree completely with Stevan on the common cause: to provide genuine value to the OA community and the research community in general. We would like to do that by offering a clean, easy-to-build-on service for service providers.
By the way that is more or less the same strategy we have when it comes to the DOAJ. DOAJ is not primarily an end user service, more so it is a service ^Ö and it is primarily used as a service ^Ö for service providers. Libraries and commercial aggregators all over the world are (OAI-)harvesting records from the DOAJ into their library catalogues and portals and the commercial aggregators integrates the DOAJ records in their products, thus improving visibility and usage of the Open Access Journals.
So: Green and Gold go hand in hand!
Lars Björnshauge
Director of Libraries
Lund University
Partner in the OpenDOAR service
----- Original Message -----
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
Date: Saturday, January 28, 2006 2:02 pm
Subject: From ROAR to DOAR
> On Fri, 27 Jan 2006, Hélène Bosc wrote:
>
> > Peux tu m'expliquer ce qu'il y a derrière Opendoar?
>
> I'll reply in English to your question of what is behind OpenDoar,
> so I can post the reply more widely:
>
> > Manifestement [ça reprend] les réalisations dejà faites à
> Southampton...
> It is true that -- so far -- DOAR is mostly just re-doing, funded,
> what Tim
> had already done, unfunded (with ROAR). DOAR so far covers about
> 3/5 of
> the archives in ROAR and 1/2 the number in OAIster, and does not
> yet measure
> or provide a way to display the time-course of their growth in
> contentsor number, as ROAR does. (DOAR will need Tim's Celestial
> to do that.)
>
> http://www.opendoar.org/
> http://archives.eprints.org/
> http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/
> http://celestial.eprints.org/
>
> However, DOAR does provide an OAI Base URL in what looks (to my
> eyes: DOAR
> does not yet give tallies) to be a much larger proportion of
> archives than
> ROAR does (c. 80%), and this is presumably because DOAR has directly
> contacted each archive individually for which the OAI Base URL was
> missing.
> (This is something I had asked Tim to do, but it is perhaps too much
> to expect from an unfunded doctoral student, primarily working on his
> thesis! The solution of course is for archives to expose their own
> OAI Base URLs for harvesters to pick up automatically, and this will
> of course be the ultimate outcome. For now, there is no Registry that
> all archives use or aspire to be covered by. If DOAR incorporates all
> of the useful features of ROAR (especially celestial), and adds value,
> it may succeed in becoming that Registry. So far, ROAR's periodic
> callsto Archives to register have insufficient success. Most of ROAR's
> new archives for the past year or more have been hand-imported by
> me and
> Tim! At least DOAR will be funded to do that thankless task, from
> now on!)
>
> The second potentially useful feature of DOAR is that it seems to
> classifyseparately the different content types and (I think -- I'm
> not sure)
> that DOAR has checked that those are all full-texts (rather than just
> bibiographic metadata: DOAR will have to make this more explicit in
> their documentation).
>
> If so, then DOAR can potentially provide size and growth-rate
> charts by
> content types (preprints, postprints, theses, etc.), though there is
> no way to do this (or boolean combinations) in DOAR yet. (The Eprints
> software already tags and exposes content types as well as whether or
> not each entry is a full-text; I expect that the other archive
> softwareswill soon follow suit. Then it's up to the archives to
> provide and expose
> those metadata, so the harvesters can pick up and tally it.)
>
> Right now, the DOAR entry for an archive looks a lot like a library
> card catalogue entry for a journal or a book (perhaps by analogy with
> DOAJ) or even a collection.
>
> http://www.doaj.org/
>
> This does not quite make sense to me, since users do not consult
> or use
> individual online institutional archives as they do for individual
> booksor journals or collections. For one thing, most of the
> archives will be
> university IRs. Most universities produce contents of all of the types
> listed, and in all of the subjects listed; and rarely will any
> user want
> all/only, say, articles on subject X from individual institution
> Y: They
> will instead use an OAI harvester and service-provider like
> OAIster or
> citebase or citeseer or even google scholar, that searches across all
> institutions on that subject, or even all subjects.
>
> Hence the only likely use for those type and subject classifications
> is either (1) for an automatic OAI harvester, using them to mediate
> in harvesting the archives' metadata directly or (2) for individuals
> interested in gathering summary statistics on individual archive
> offerings. (And again, the optimal and most likely outcome is that the
> archives themselves will expose these metadata to be picked up
> directlyby harvesters, rather than having to be mediated by a
> middle-service,
> hand-gathering and checking any missing data.)
>
> So there are still functionality issues to be thought through if
> DOAR is
> to provide a useful service. But I expect these things will be
> resolved,and that DOAR will build on ROAR something that provides
> genuine value
> to the OA community and the research community in general, helping to
> hasten the day of 100% OA.
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
Received on Mon Jan 30 2006 - 10:49:35 GMT