On 8 Mar 2006, at 13:32, Andy Powell wrote:
> I may be missing the point here, but if Richard is correct
> ...
> then perhaps his conclusions don't
> go far enough? Why talk about repositories at all? Why not simply
> say
> that all scholarly output should be made available on the Web?
A reasonable question, but I think that you'll find that the answer
is not a matter of "simply" anything, because evidence is that (left
to themselves) researchers don't deposit their articles on the web
either!
In an environmental assessment that Jessie Hey and Pauline Simpson
undertook for the TARDis project, they discovered that most
departments in Southampton University had some research papers on the
web, but that these web pages were on average two years out of date.
(The figure is from memory, but the report is available from the
TARDis web site tardis.eprints.org).
The web (of itself) does not encourage more self-deposit of research
papers or data. And why should it? It can be quite an onerous task to
keep a web site up-to-date.
So whether a Web Page or a Repository you need a mandate to ensure
that research output is captured. And given a mandate (and hence
accessible research), the added benefits of a repository over a
website seem clear - a repository provides a focus for
interoperability and services, maintenance of documents/data and for
monitoring policy and practice. And through targeted collection of
metadata it should provide the opportunity for information reuse for
all sorts of academic tasks (CV building, bibliography lists,
administrative returns, RSS feeds etc) to provide immediate help to
researchers and managers.
---
Les Carr
Received on Thu Mar 09 2006 - 13:13:31 GMT