On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 1:42 PM, Dan Brickley <dan...@danbri.org> wrote:
> [snip] > > Thought experiment: what if authors posted to their personal sites, but > with enough metadata (e.g. http://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle) for > generic (rather than topical/institutional) search engine discovery to be > feasible? > > I'm generally in favour of schema.org because I think it will succeed and will be simple enough to be used. However there are at least the following problems for #scholpub. - The websites are impermanent. "Personal" = departmental pages ? or family pages? both (and other variants are extremely prone to decay - There are no rights. Therefore it is essential that the author gives the right at least to copy. No institutional repository would take the risk of perserving anything outside. It might violate copyright. - It is unclear who if anyone would archive this. Not universities. National libraries, yes - but this is very patchy and is probably locked away in dark archives. It might otherwise violate copyright. - It is undiscoverable. So without an index the usage would be appallingly low. Of course there is the academic's friend Google. But we aren't paying them anything for this and the traffic isn't worth much. They probably don't want to offend big publishers because they get income from them. I know another academic search engine which worries about this - Certain publishers forbid it. So it has to be "illegal". Many academics don't like doing illegal things. Mind you a strong lead from senior academics could change this. But the number of senior academics trying to change the system is almost negligible, so we have to take Planck's approach and wait till they die. And even then they are training their successors to be just as illiberal. So even if 100% of authors do this, and they won't (chemistry??) it's a grey archive at best. The best chance I think is to create completely disruptive business models and tools - and who knows, schema.org might be part of that even without the academics involvement -- 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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