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

Thu Dec 5 16:58:02 UTC 2013

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Emanuil Tolev <emanuil at cottagelabs.com>wrote:

> On 5 December 2013 16:03, Mark MacGillivray <mark at cottagelabs.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk>wrote:
>>
>>> <snip>
>
>>
>> How do we overcome that localised impetus to "do it some other way"?
>>
>
> So how did arxiv do it? Can they take on more or can we replicate it
> (without duplicating their efforts obviously). Note they're still hosted by
> a single institution, yet archive the content of whole disciplines (or
> close to it). So even the potential politics that you'd think would break
> such a project obviously didn't.
>

They didn't. There are still people in positions where they would not be
allowed to refer to content in arxiv, even though what is there may be the
most recent and comprehensive content.

Strangely, and in relation to Peters earlier comment that there are plenty
of people beyond the institutional bounds I mentioned (which is of course
true), it is the people within institutional bounds that are most
constrained by these issues.

I think it must come down to - as all successful services do - convenience.
Make it so easy and so much better than any alternative that people every
where want to use it, then they will change their communities to suit.

But again, the hard part in addition to making the thing easy is in letting
everybody know at least that it exists, so that they can try it and realise
it is better.

There are plenty of good people in libraries and other places that would
recommend such a great service over the "usual ways to do it", but there
must be some sort of comms-y / marketing / advertising-y stuff we do not
know about but probably must engage in.

Mark

>
>> 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.
>>
>
> Right, well http://cottagelabs.com/news/an-academic-catalogue . But as in
> summer 2012, the issue is time, who has the availability to commit properly
> to this kind of project / this project, bring it to MVP, get some users (so
> you can't give up) and keep at it?
> It's not even like we tried that hard to get help with it (money and
> people), just because we had to build other things. And obviously we're
> still working on it, but it feels like the kind of thing that should have
> been available years ago. I want to be using it! (I don't mind building it,
> but not having it is frustrating.)
>
> Every. single. discussion. that a research-related project like OAButton
> and OAG has ends up in "we want a queryable index of all the research with
> licensing info and an API and a data dump, so not Google Scholar .. uh ok
> let's use CORE but we want a better one".
>
> Emanuil
>
>>
>>
>> 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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