Re: New Ranking of Central and Institutional Repositories
Begin forwarded message:
[Stevan, please post this for me. Thanks very much.]
Hi Arthur, Mark,
We comment partly on the basis of what exists now, rather
than what
could be in place, I think. A colleague of mine has
written a script
that automatically includes author's bibliographies in
their personal or
departmental web pages, just by using a link in a PHP (or
other) server
include in an HTML tag. This saves them lots of work and
encourages
deposit.
Let's suppose that every academic did this (as I suspect
they don't,
even if able). Could we anticipate that academics might
want to look at
each other's research profiles much more, given that
they'd have a
direct link to the output? I wonder, do you have any
statistical
information on this, Arthur, to say whether this actually
works? If it
became more widespread, as a general culture rather than
just in the odd
institution, would these links gain value that they don't
presently
have? I'm not arguing with you in principle, Arthur, as I
have neither
evidence nor motive, but I'm interested to know what you
think: how can
we know the future value of links if at present their
application is
haphazard? I'm sure that the haphazard nature of any
"service" puts
people immediately off using the occasional parts of it
that do work,
because these are difficult to predict. Just speculations
on my part
perhaps, as the future is a bit tough to research!
It's my hope that *any* ways to increase access research
content, be
that search engines, links or any other method, will grow
as open access
grows, so what seems trivial at present may one day be a
useful way to
promote content. Things change so fast that we do need to
entertain this
sort of speculation, I think. For the moment, of course,
our stats here
for example do seem to show, as Arthur says, that search
engines (well,
just Google) are way ahead of everything else.
Talat
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM --
LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On
Behalf Of Arthur Sale
Sent: 13 February 2008 20:47
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM --
LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: New Ranking of Central and Institutional
Repositories
Mark Doyle
The dominant institutional repository softwares ALL have
such simple
identifiers. The softwares are not badly designed.
But that does not obscure the essential point that inward
bound links on
the
open web are a minor contributor to a repository success.
Many links
that
are used are not exposed on the Web, and are simply kept
in an EndNote
file,
or bookmarked. People use institutional repositories via
search engines,
not
links.
Subject repositories are subject to different rules.
Arthur
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM
-- LISTSERVER.SIGMAX
I.ORG] On Behalf Of Mark Doyle
Sent: Thursday, 14 February 2008 6:41 AM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM --
LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re:
[AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM] New
Ranking of Central and Institutional
Repositories
Hi,
On Feb 12, 2008, at 4:38 PM, Arthur Sale
wrote:
This brings me to the second
point: Repositories were not set
up to
provide linkage, and if they were
to be in the deep web apart from
being harvestable, their utility
would be only slightly weakened.
Indeed this is exactly the
situation with most of the PhD
thesis
repositories in Australia. The
federated site is open to
the Web, and
a very few thesis sites like my
university's, but most university
repositories are simply in the
deep web, accessed only by the
federated harvester. This is the
Australasian Digital
Theses Program,
also listed in the Webometrics
top 200. I haven't heard 30+
universities complaining about
the loss of links.
I think this is poor design. Depending on
bookmarked URLs
and 'browse by name' is a rather fragile
infrastructure. One
of the reasons that a central repository like
arXiv.org is so
successful is because Ginsparg, in his
wisdom, came up with
short, somewhat meaningful identifiers (new
arXiv ids are now
slightly less than ideal, but at least you
can tell right
away when something was first entered into
the repository)
AND provided for the ubiquitous linking to
arXiv.org via the
/abs/ID URL. These URLs have been stable
since they were
introduced in 1994 when the web interface was
introduced
(even after the xxx.lanl.gov -> arXiv.org
transition). This
has allowed the arXiv staff to insert
clickable links into
the PDFs and people to trivially link to the
arXiv version of
a work. On the publisher side, considerable
effort has been
put into introducing DOIs which again make it
easy to provide
interlinking between scholarly articles. Some
publishers
(like APS) have easy to create DOIs from the
usual (journal,
volume, page) metadata (or even URLs that
don't depend on a
DOI), while others are more opaque. CrossRef
levels the
playing field though and makes DOIs easily
discoverable. In
any case, one should not underestimate the
usefulness of
having simple identifiers that map
algorithmically to permanent URLs.
Best,
Mark
Mark Doyle
Assistant Director, Journal Information
Systems The American
Physical Society
Received on Thu Feb 14 2008 - 13:30:18 GMT
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