Re: How to Compare IRs and CRs

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2008 18:47:42 +0000

On Sat, 9 Feb 2008, dwojick_at_hughes.net wrote:

> Steve, I am concerned when you say the following --
> > "It's from the local repositories that the local produce can then be
> > "harvested" (the limitations of a mixed metaphor!) to some central
> > site, if desired, or just straight to an indexer like Google Scholar
> > or Citebase."
>
> OA in 10's of 1,000's of IRs is virtually worthless without some very
> good, central, global, search capability. How to build this capability
> is far from clear.
>
> David Wojick
> http://www.osti.gov

The answer is as simple as it is certain: OA's problem today is *content*
not *search*.

What is missing is 85+% of OA's target content (2.5M annual articles
in 25K peer-reviewed journals), not the means of searching it! Current
search power -- both implemented and under development -- is orders of
magnitude richer than the OA database for which it is intended.

Figure out a way to fill all the world's university IRs with 100% of
their annual article output, and the rest is a piece of cake.

Keep fussing about the dessert when there's still no main course, and
you have a recipe for prolonging the hunger of your esteemed guests
even longer than they've already endured it (for over a decade and a
half to date).

(The way is already figured out, by the way: it's the institutional
Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate. What still needs effort is getting the
universities to go ahead and adopt them, instead of waiting passively,
while fussing instead about preservation, copyright, publishing reform,
-- and improved search engines!)

Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h
tml
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/

UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
    http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html

OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
    BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
    http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
    BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
    a suitable one exists.
    http://www.doaj.org/
AND
    in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
    in your own institutional repository.
    http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
    http://archives.eprints.org/
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/
Received on Sat Feb 09 2008 - 20:56:42 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Dec 10 2010 - 19:49:12 GMT