On 12 Jul 2010, at 06:25, Leslie Chan wrote:
> This is rather circular. The view that academic papers should be fixed in
> form and format is rather out of sync with the emergence of new forms of
> scholarly expression enabled by the web.
I don't wish to argue that academic writing SHOULD BE fixed in format, merely to observe that IT IS predominantly so.
> " Academics should be encouraged to
> explore a heterogeneous range of formats, reaching different audiences and
> finding new ways to write about research."
When they do, we'll find a way to measure it :-)
If you believe they are in a significant way, let's do it!
> I think this discussion raises a fundamental question about the design of
> IRs and their support for scholarship. IRs must do better to capture the
> diversity of scholarly contribution and formats, and make them count in
> meaningful way.
I wholeheartedly concur.
> Do we really need more output based comparisons?
We need a range of comparisons of many sorts to get as full a picture as possible.
> How should we define the most "useful"? Should download and other usage
> stats be taken into consideration, instead of only in-bound links?
If we had access to those statistics, by all means lets use them.
> Why wait for Microsoft? What has the the open source community be doing on
> this front? What about OpenOffice? Any good open source NLM DTD conversion
> tools out there? Why has it taken so long?
If there was something for open office then it would be trivial for repositories to apply it to Microsoft Word documents.
--
Les Carr
Received on Mon Jul 12 2010 - 14:21:01 BST