Thanks for you assessment about Kepler. One aspect, which we may not
have made very clear in our paper directly relates to the concerns you
have raised. We envision the Kepler framework to be deployed to support
different communities, where a community would provide the required
functionality via its service provider. For example, it is possible to
have a technical report community that uses the Kepler framework to
provide various high level services including long term preservation
function. This typically would be provided by the community service
provider, which will keep a copy of the technical reports published by
individual publishers. In fact, on one end of the spectrum you can
treat Kepler archivelet as nothing but a publishing tool for a given
community or an institution. I hope this clarifies some of your
concerns.
------------------------------------------------------------
Prof. M. Zubair
Department of Computer Science
Old Dominion University, Norfolk
VA 23529
Phone: 757-683-3917 Fax: 757-683-4900
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> Maly, Kurt and Mohammad Zubair and Xiaoming Liu. [39]"Kepler - An OAI
> Data/Service Provider for the Individual" D-Lib Magazine 7(4)
> (April 2001) (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april01/maly/04maly.html). -
>
> This article describes a simple Open Archives Initiative
> repository tool called Kepler. By using this application
> individual researchers can participate in the OAI with a minimum of
> effort. Kepler is a bit different from other OAI repository tools.
> First, it uses a file system to store its data, not a database.
> Second, and more importantly, Kepler works in conjunction with a
> "registration" server. This registration server is modeled on the idea
> of peer-to-peer networking schemes such as Napster. If used in the way
> it was designed, Kepler can facilitate wide-scale dissemination of
> scholarly papers and information. No fuss. No muss. - ELM
> As far as I can tell (and I hope my more technical colleagues will be
> able to confirm or correct this), Kepler is a kind of smaller-scale
> eprints.org archive-maker. It too creates an (OAI-compliant?)
> archive, but at the individual rather than the institutional level.
>
> As such, if it works and is robust, it is more than welcome! It can
> contribute to the freeing of the refereed literature.
>
> Only three things worry me about Kepler.
>
> (1) It looks like it is appealing to authors to SELF-PUBLISH (rather
> than merely to self-archive their research, pre- and post-publication).
> This "vanity press" motivation is, in my opinion, at odds with the
> self-archiving intiative, whose primary goal is to free the refereed
> journal literature on-line.
>
> (2) One advantage of institutional rather than individual archives is
> that it puts the long-term preservation function into stronger and more
> durable hands. Can individuals promise this same reliability?
>
> (3) The association with Napster is not a confidence-enhancing
> one...
> american-scientist-open-access-forum_at_amsci.org
>
> But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If the Kepler software
> works, and is robust, reliable and lasting, then I certainly hope
> authors will use it, and register and maintain their archives at OAI.
>
> "Peer Review" and "Preservation" are high on the list of prima facie
> worries that are retarding self-archiving. It is very important that
> our efforts refute rather reinforce such worries...
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.Preservation
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#7.Peer
>
> Stevan Harnad
Received on Wed Jan 03 2001 - 19:17:43 GMT