[Open-access] Collections of Libre material

[Peter Murray-Rust]

As I blogged earlier
http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/02/12/what-is-the-use-of-ccess-do-owls-get-malaria-is-wikipedia-believable-who%E2%80%99s-alice-hibbert-ware/and
http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/02/12/avian-malaria-can-bibsoup-and-ccess-help-do-penguins-get-malaria/.
The latter was depressing in some respects in that probably only about
4/70 papers were OKD/BOAI-open (I suggest we use the term Libre on this
list as it avoids the confusion with Open Access and we know here what we
are talking about.) This was from the decade 2000-2010 and we can expect
earlier papers are even less libre

Although a collection of 5/70 means that a particular resource is unlikley
to be found, we can look for material that is generically useful. I'm
assuming that in many cases the malaria community would simply need an
example of something. I'm guessing that the following could be generally
useful:
 * images
 * tables
 * graphs
 * introductions
 * reference lists (bibliography)

What I'm suggesting technically is that we can have a button that transfers
the *link* to these resources directly to the Bibsoup. That when someone
reads a paper they can click an "add a link to this image to bibsoup".
Bibsoup itself will (probably) not hold images, but this will make it very
easy to build a fully open collection. Tables and graphs can also be
extremely useful, even if they relate to specific experiements

The material might be:
 * re-used in lectures
 * re-used in newspapers
 * re-used in books
 * re-used in artistic creations
 * searchable by machine (we can do this for chemical diagrans, etc. and I
can see it being possible in gels, histology, etc.)
 * useful for student assignments

The material should always carry a back reference to the original paper
(this id more than most Open image collections have)

This is a small positive useful start. The idea will be that as people find
it generally useful they will be tempted to add more material to the
bibliography. We might even get to a stage where authors archived their
pre-publication material (cf arXiv). I'm an optimist today


H


-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-access/attachments/20120213/ac96554a/attachment.html>