On Sun. Mar 16 Thomas Krichel wrote:
Lee Miller writes
> The simplest way to aggregate papers within disciplines would be include a
> discipline field in the metadata. ...... Thus inclusion of the discipline
> desciptor "ecology" would allow aggregation of papers at a level that has
> already proved useful to ecologists for over a century.
>
> A similar level of aggregation in other fields would surely be useful as a
> tool for harvesting papers of particular interest from institutional
archives.
Yes, but this is not what I think is the prime task of aggregator
services. Your thinking is that such services will make it easier
for users to find papers belonging to a certain discipline. Within
that thinking I agree there is scope for value-added user services.
For example, once you have identified all paper is the area
of ecology, you can start something like "NEP: New Ecology
Papers". That is, you can mail a list of all the new papers
that have appeared within the subject of ecology out to
editors (who would be working as volunteers) and then have
them filter those papers that belong to microorganisms,
terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, etc, and forward the
paper discriptions to a list of subscribers who are interested
in those subjects. Such a system already works well with
RePEc, see http://nep.repec.org.
But: such value added services for users are not the main
function of aggregators, imho. Aggregators are more about
serving the authors of papers. They should be conceived
as instruments to incentivize authors to contribute to
formal archives.
You want to use aggregation to as an incentive to authors, and I see
aggregation as merely a tool to help consumers of research narrow their
searches. I don't see these options as being mutually exclusive. Both are
valuable.
Lee Miller
