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

Peter Murray-Rust pm286 at cam.ac.uk
Fri Dec 6 07:09:36 UTC 2013


For nearly ten years I have tried to promote the idea of indexing or
repositories and got nowhere. I wish it were different. As examples:

* I ran a funded JISC (UK) project on Open Bibliography.I offered to
explore the indexing of theses (unlike NL it is impossible to find online
theses in UK other than manually trawling through 200 repos). I presented
to the ETHOS project but their priority was to digitize the past.They told
me I would have to seek permission from every individual author.

* I wrote to Bernard Rentier offering to come to Liege and investigate
indexing the ORBI repository on a scientific basis. His repsonse was that
they were taking a staged approach and that [paraphrasing] I should wait a
few years.

* After a tweet I thought that LSE was intested and blogged a proposal to
index it. They weren't actually interested.

* I wrote several times to the Cambridge Librarian about text-mining. She
never acknowledged my mails.

More generally:

* repo owners are no interested in anyone outside their library doing
anything with their content. They have a ?10-year (or longer) plan to
federate them

* some repo owners (including Liege) deliberately choose CC-NC and refuse
to change.

So personally I have become disillusions with conventional repos. The UK
REF makes it worse as the sole purpose of many repos seems to be to
accumulate the content on which the university is formally judged.This does
not have to be Open. The mentality is not a service positively exposing
content to the world but a bureaucratic management process.

It may be different in other countries...


No - trying to index even one UK


On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 12:07 AM, Mike Taylor <mike at indexdata.com> wrote:

> Well, sure! I'm not criticising the vision; I'm criticising how far
> short of that vision the world we live in currently falls!
>
> You may find it irrational that an institution wants its faculty's
> papers openly available only from their IR and nowhere else. People
> whose job it is to count beans will disagree. Needless to say, I'm on
> your side, but there's no point in pretending the bean-counters don't
> exist.
>
> -- Mike.
>
>
> On 5 December 2013 23:53, Bjoern Brembs <b.brembs at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Friday, December 6, 2013, 12:45:25 AM, you wrote:
> >
> >> They want the world to come to their one
> >> special magic web-site and read the papers only there. Which is not
> >> that much more advanced than the position of paywalled publishers.
> >
> > Perhaps I'm really hopelessly naive, but this
> > seems so irrational, it shouldn't take much to
> > move beyond this argument.
> >
> >> The real issues here are much more social than technical. As usual.
> >
> > There is no debating that, I guess :-) Which is
> > why visions are important: visions get people
> > motivated to be a part in realizing them.
> > I believe the vision of getting everything in one place,
> > filtered, sorted and immensely relevant is
> > powerful!
> >
> > Bjoern
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Björn Brembs
> > ---------------------------------------------
> > http://brembs.net
> > Neurogenetics
> > Universität Regensburg
> > Germany
> >
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-- 
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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