[Open-access] [open-science] OKF at Open Repositories 2014

Thu Dec 5 16:03:17 UTC 2013

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> >>Many have tried to build an open index of scholarship (I've tried with
> others too, still trying) but I haven't heard of a big one just yet. While
> this is probably the "ultimate" topic of such a workshop, I don't think
> we're at the stage where you can base a workshop on that idea. Maybe the
> other 2 examples above + other existing projects come together to a greater
> whole worthy of a workshop though.
>
> There is no technical reason why not, and I think the need is becoming
> clearer. Figshare showed that one graduate student can change the world,
> OAButton showed that undergraduates will. Wikipedia has built a better
> knowledge engine than almost any university. We have all the indexing tools
> built (we can add Pubcrawler to the Cottagelab tools) and the problem can
> be scaled with committed humans.
>

If we built this, do you think there is any possibility of getting traction
with people to say things like:

1. "If you want to find scholarly material, THIS is where to look"

2. "If you want to deposit scholarly material, THIS is where you do it"

Whilst relying on universities or similar community structures may be the
way of the past, it is still where most people are - and most people care
only about accessing what they need; thus point 1 is easier, but point 2
will be polluted by the local community an individual is part of.

How do we overcome that localised impetus to "do it some other way"?

If enough people believe we can overcome this and are willing to be
involved in doing so, then I am willing to build and maintain the thing
(and others, of course, would help me).

This would be something to discuss at OR14 - a new global archive of all
available scholarly content (pre-populated with everything we can find and
regularly crawl for in all other archives), and an initiative to get people
to start using it across the world.

Mark

>
>
>
> --
> Peter Murray-Rust
> Reader in Molecular Informatics
> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> University of Cambridge
> CB2 1EW, UK
> +44-1223-763069
>
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