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

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 4:13 PM, Emanuil Tolev <emanuil at cottagelabs.com>wrote:

>
>
> Dumb question: why can't arXiv handle content from all disciplines?
> (Manpower? Technical debt? All of it probably boils down to willingness and
> money, but if we can identify problems with existing
> centralised-but-not-comprehensive-enough systems, we can do something about
> it.)
>

There is no technical reason.

arXiv is a preprint server though I gather that many authors later submit
their final corrected version of record.

Many chemistry publishers forbid preprints. Chemist would swallow prussic
acid rather than put their work in a preprint server. There are groups in
the same laboratory who only know what the neigbouring lab is doing by
reading the literature. Imperial College chemists demanded that all theses
are embargoed for at least 5 years - because there is a danger that someone
might read them.

I believe in discipline repositories where the community approves -
bioscience  and astronomy are good on this. Putting science in an IR
destroys it - you have to have a practising expert associated with the
repo. arXiv has that.


> You mention Wikipedia, and it does fulfil those criteria. But how can we
> deposit research metadata on wikipedia (or more broadly, how to use it to
> describe research)?
>

I'd let the Wikipedians answer that.


> You could run a wiki which stores all the full text of all the OA articles
> or the PDF file where that's unavailable. But this is still a piece of
> software, not a system. If we're not talking about wiki software, but
> Wikipedia.org, I'm not sure how research metadata (or the text of all the
> OA research) would fit into it.
>

Wik* is much more than an encyclopedia. There's Wikispecies, Wikidata...


>
> Hm, my notion of a workshop was more towards the "people come to hear how
> to do this or about work in progress on this", but it's actually a lot more
> of a discussion / contribution thing. I guess you can run them both ways,
> more towards the lecture side of the spectrum and more towards the hacking
> side. So yes, "Building the Green cake and decorating it" or a subset of
> that is a viable topic then.
>

None of us know how to build the whole thing. Some of us things we know how
to start. We want other people to become involved and change those ideas,
improve them, implement them. No, lecturing at people isn't really
appropriate.

>
>
> --
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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