[Open-access] [GOAL] Re: Re: Fight Publishing Lobby's Latest "FIRST" Act to Delay OA - Nth Successor to PRISM, RWA etc.

Sun Dec 1 14:27:50 UTC 2013

On Saturday, November 30, 2013, 12:30:54 AM, you wrote:

> The technology to do all of this already exists. Most of
> the STEM metadata you describe is actually directly
> available in Medline, and the core parts can be used as
> per the open biblio principles. Crawling the websites is
> already possible using pubcrawler and other tools, and
> finding out what their stated licence status is can be
> done with howopenisit (although more often than not the
> answer is "not properly defined").

Precisely!!

> However the hard part is not building or running these
> things or collecting all the data, but sustaining it in
> and imbuing it with credibility.

Totally agreed!

> For example I can run a server with all this on it at not
> too much personal expense, but who would treat it as a
> serious source? Scaling up to handle a large amount of
> users and providing a good service does cost money, which
> I (we) could probably find a way to fund - but even then,
> we still have to solve that credibility problem. It has to
> be known by those in or entering the field that "this is
> where you go to find this stuff" - as opposed to the
> current "go to the library and follow all the rules" approach.

What we should be able to do right now (and for some of that we're applying for grants as I type this), is to start building the infrastructure for software and data. This will provide the opportunity to develop standards for how to make the databases for text (repositories), data and software interoperable.

Simultaneously, these standards need t be communicated and adopted by a critical mass of institutions.

But perhaps most importantly, the institutions participating in crawling and harvesting all our literature need to develop a way of searching, filtering and sorting not only the existing literature, but especially the incoming, new literature in a way that is superior to what we have now. Given that there isn't really a single place where you can exhaustively search the literature, the first part should be easy (existing literature).

For the second part, (incoming, newly published literature), we're currently in the process of developing an RSS reader which is tailor-made for scientists.

Thus, if there is a superior way to handle the literature, that outcompetes everything we have right now (again, not too difficult), people will go there, simple because they save time and effort that way.

The next step will be an authoring tool that allows collaborative writing with scientific referencing and peer-review. there are currently several initiatives developing that environment. Once this is running, submission will be as simple as hitting 'submit'. Everybody who has ever submitted to a journal knows how people will flock to a service that allows submission with a single click.

Thus, I agree, this will be the important part, but offering a superior way should do most of the work - just look at how quickly GScholar was accepted.

Cheers,

Bjoern

-- 
Björn Brembs
---------------------------------------------
http://brembs.net
Neurogenetics
Universität Regensburg
Germany