Re: Dramatic Growth of Open Access: December 11, 2009 Early Year-End Edition

From: Dirk Pieper <dirk.pieper_at_UNI-BIELEFELD.DE>
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:03:47 +0100

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Dear Heather,


> Yes indeed this is dramatic growth! I see that BASE is posting the
> numbers on the website, so that I can now add BASE to future editions
> of Dramatic Growth.

History of BASE can be seen here:

http://base.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/en/about_statistics.php?menu=2


> It is also noteworthy that BASE has sophisticated searching,
> including advanced searching, unlike Scientific Commons. What puzzles
> me though is, if BASE has fewer repositories harvested than Scientific
> Commons, why does Scientific Commons include more publications? (32
> million to 21.8 million for BASE).

We are also wondering about the fact, that we have indexed more repositories
than Scientific Commons (and OAIster) did, while concurrently having fewer
records in our index.

The gap to OAIster regarding the number of records was not that big and was
explainable. Although they had a lot of repositories we didn't have and vice
versa, the main reason was, that three big ones were not in BASE: Internet
Archive (about 1,3 Mio records), Picture Australia (about 1,2 Mio records) and
CiteBase (about 850,000 records). Internet Archive is a good example, because
we have harvested it of course, but the OAI-interface is only delivering about
300,000 records ...

I don't have an idea to explain the gap to Scientific Common, maybe the
colleagues from there can explain that? All I can say is, that we try to check
dublicate documents, delete repositories, that don't work anymore or don't
provide links to documents.


> This is a topic well worth further exploring; there are now very
> substantial resources available, and so the question of best
> approaches to searching for documents is very worth of research.

We already did that:

http://eprints.rclis.org/15558/

We are planning to repeat a similar study next year and maybe we should issue
that in english language.

Best
Dirk
Received on Tue Dec 15 2009 - 11:02:30 GMT

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