[open-humanities] OA Journal aggregation: further thoughts

Tue Aug 30 15:16:34 UTC 2011

Hello all,

I'm writing to see if what interest and support there is for developing 
some sort of OA humanities journal aggregation system, as I sketched in 
my email earlier this month:
http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-humanities/2011-August/000111.html

As listed on the okf ideas incubator:
http://ideas.okfn.org/ideas/198/website-for-finding-and-searching-oa-humanities-journals

The basic problem is that there are many open access journals, and so 
also many websites. There isn't a single interface for searching them. 
One must also be aware of each individual journal, a mind-stretching 
task given how many there are.
(The DOAJ lists nearly 7,000 at the time of writing: http://www.doaj.org/ )

To solve this, I propose some sort of aggregation website, that lists 
and makes searchable not just the journals' details, as DOAJ does, but 
also their contents. It won't actually publish articles, but make 
pre-existing materials discoverable through indexing.

(My particular interest is in OA *humanities*, esp. history journals. 
There seem to be a lot of these around. But there's no reason why 
something similar shouldn't be built for OA science journals, if that's 
neccessary.)

So, some questions:

1: Does anyone know of any similar sort of project (in any field)? 
Something that can be used as an example, perhaps that has built or 
repurposed some software?

2: Can OKFN offer support in any way - perhaps server space?

3: Is this just some sort of glorified search engine?

4: Is anyone out there interested and prepared (however tentatively) to 
work on it?

5: What next?

Best,

john

-- 
John Levin
http://www.anterotesis.com
johnlevin at joindiaspora.com
http://twitter.com/anterotesis