Posted with Permission
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 2 May 2007 18:50:57 +0400
From: Sergey Parinov <sparinov--hse.ru>
To: harnad--uqam.ca,
Dear Stevan,
Just for information on our progress with Open Access to Research I send
you fragments of my final report to the Ford Foundation with some my comments
(most of the innovations described below have been reported in Russian only
at the moment):
1. We established in the Social Sciences Section of the Russian Academy
of Sciences (SSS RAS) a work group "Socionet" (about 50 members), including
managers, librarians, social and informatics scientists mostly from 29
research institutes of the SSS RAS and from some other organizations. The
work group initiated a national version of a long-term program "Open
Access to Research." The program implements ideas and methods for an Open
Access to Research international initiative (
http://www.eprints.org/)
to build in Russia a prototype e-Social Sciences organizational model
based on modern e-infrastructure for research (stemming from Socionet tools
and online services).
2. As the first technical step toward free and open access to research in
Russian Social Science we created (within the Socionet Online Workbench)
a set of tools for establishing institutional Open Archives (or digital
repositories) compatible with the international Open Archives Initiative
(OAI) standards (
http://www.openarchives.org/). Using these tools
representatives from research institutes will create institutional
Open Archives (OAs) and register them in international OA registries
(e.g.
http://roar.eprints.org/). This will allow an integration of
current social science research results into an international research
dissemination network based on OAI interoperability.
The Socionet OAI tools allow an integration under institutional
OAs of all relevant series that come to the Socionet database
in different ways. We have registered the first such OAs in ROAR
and the first Russian institutional policy OA Mandate in ROARMAP
<
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/> (the policy itself -
http://www.cemi.rssi.ru/rus/news/initiat-eng.htm)
3. All members of the Socionet work group (from the SSS RAS research
institutes) were involved in a series of training sessions and seminars (5
events in Moscow and 8 in other cities) to teach them current methods
of information representation for their research institutes, researchers
and research activity, based on Socionet tools and services. As a result
of this project's training activity 22 institutes (out of 29) have
created in decentralized mode, a pool of data, including: a)
organizational profiles (institutes and departments); b) personal profiles
of scientists from institutes' staff; c) news channels; d) collections of
different types of electronic materials with research results (preprints,
postprints, theses, description of books, and etc.). These pools of
institutional data represent a technical preparedness on the part of 22
SSS RAS institutes to run their institutional OAs. The last step is to
achieve official approval of OA content by the institute authorities.
4. As a step toward further developing the Socionet system as a
prototype national research e-infrastructure we created within
Socionet a new entity: an Information Hub (you can read about it
in paper in English -
http://sinin.nsc.ru/docs/techbrid-D2-3-09-2006-1.htm
http://exchange.hse.ru/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://sinin.nsc.ru/docs/techbrid-D2-3-09-2006-1.htm
The main added value of the Information Hub is a unification of
different types of research metadata (description of papers, profiles
and etc.) located somewhere on the Internet with different formats (REDIF
is one of them) into one standardized database; The Information Hub
allows any user to export selected parts of integrated metadata for
building the user's own thematic collections and for other professional
purposes. As a result of this Socionet Information Hub implemention we
have a professional information space for the Social Sciences disciplines
with daily updating (including RePEc dataset).
All institutional data from item 3 above are integrated by the Information
Hub even if they are external to the Socionet electronic resources,
parts of the institution's web site and so on. On this basise scientists
have can develop their professional social networks
across organizational/disciplinary information spaces by linking related
personal/organizational profiles and electronic materials, including
the ability to make electronic citations to their research papers.
One of the main outputs of this is the growth of an intensive
network of "social" links over the corpus of e-Social Sciences
research materials. See as an sample my own personal profile
(with the table "Relations" at the upper left corner of the web page) -
http://socionet.ru/publication.xml?h=repec:rus:ecoper:parinov_sergey.56054-1&type=person&l=en
5. Research performance/impact indicators and scientometrics derived
from scientists' online activity statistics are important parts
of the e-Social Sciences. From 2007.01.01 we ran for the whole of
Socionet
information space (as one more step in the e-infrastructure status for
Socionet) a daily procedure (developing the
http://logec.repec.org/
model) of harvesting statistics about numbers of views (material
descriptions, personal/organizational profiles) and downloads (full text
of papers/articles) for all informational objects, excluding duplications
and indexing by software robots (like Google and others). Accumulated
online statistics can be used freely by any researcher for all kinds of
scientometric research (
ftp://socionet.ru/raw-stats/). We built online
research metrics
http://exchange.hse.ru/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://socionet.ru/publication.xml?h=repec:rus:mqijxk:16
in Russian), which use information about "social" links (item 4
above) as aggregation rules for counting indicators of organizations and
scientists. See this new Socionet service at
http://exchange.hse.ru/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://socionet.ru/stats.xml
(only available in Russian at the moment).
On the base of accumulated statistics we calculate in
automated mode (with daily updating) a set of online
research performance indicators. The indicators (as daily
time series) include:
a) number of viewings/downloads for
electronic papers/articles (
http://socionet.ru/statlist-doc.xml
<
http://exchange.hse.ru/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://socionet.ru/statlist-doc.xml>
b) an author's indicator as a sum of numbers of views/downloads for
all papers/articles by author (
http://socionet.ru/statlist-auth.xml
<
http://exchange.hse.ru/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://socionet.ru/statlist-auth.xml>
, and as a sample my indicator -
http://socionet.ru/stat-auth-repec:rus:ecoper:parinov_sergey.56054-1.xml
<
http://exchange.hse.ru/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://socionet.ru/stat-auth-repec:rus:ecoper:parinov_sergey.56054-1.xml>
c) an organization's indicator as a sum of author
indicators from its staff and number of views/downloads of
its paper/article series (
http://socionet.ru/statlist-inst.xml
<
http://exchange.hse.ru/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://socionet.ru/statlist-inst.xml>
d) accumulated indicators for collections of
papers/articles (
http://socionet.ru/statlist-coll.xml
<
http://exchange.hse.ru/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://socionet.ru/statlist-coll.xml>
) and archives of collections (
http://socionet.ru/statlist-arch.xml
<
http://exchange.hse.ru/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://socionet.ru/statlist-arch.xml>
In the future, when electronic citations will be more extensively
used by Socionet users we will build a similar set of indicators (for papers,
authors and organizations) based on online statistics for citation links
among papers/articles. Currently all electronic materials at Socionet
(person/organizational profiles, papers/articles, series/archives)
are linked with their indicators' graph (including RePEc series).
6. To apply the above project results in practice we developed
online behavioral models of research activity at the individual
and organizational levels. The model includes the following:
1) a research institute mandates its research staff to immediately deposit
in the institutional OA (IR) 100% of their papers/articles with completed
research (including full texts);
2) the contents of a full institutional OA (IR) are integrated into
Socionet information space where authors and organizations can develop
their professional social networks over the full corpus of research
materials by linking and citing relevant papers/articles;
3) a Socionet Statistical service provides public online research
performance indicators used by research institutes to make evaluate
and and credit its researchers and departments.
This organizational model has been implemented at the Central Economics and
Mathematics Institute of the RAS by decree of the institutes' director signed
April 16, 2007 (
http://www.cemi.rssi.ru/rus/news/initiat-eng.htm).
We expect that other SSS RAS institutes will go on to adopt this
organizational model soon because our project created the requisite
technical basis and provided organizational examples. We believe that
individual researchers will soon recognize this new motivational mechanism --
and the Open Access to Research style of activity in general -- as a
more progressive model for professional behavior
Best wishes,
Sergey Parinov
Professor of Economics
Institute of Economics
Russian Academy of Sciences
http://sinin.nsc.ru/docs/techbrid-D2-3-09-2006-1.htm
http://ideas.repec.org/e/ppa6.html
Received on Fri May 04 2007 - 05:10:56 BST