On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>sh> our rewards (research
>sh> grant funding and overheads, salaries, postdocs and students attracted
>sh> to our research, prizes and honors) are intertwined and shared with our
>sh> institutions (our employers) and not our disciplines (which are often
>sh> in fact the locus of competition for those same rewards!)
>
> But this is not just a matter of rewards. Disciplinary communities play a
> vital role in adding coherence to a field. They help researchers focus on
> the developing streams of thought and discovery, and on the
> interrelationships between specialized knowledge and the broader body of
> knowledge residing in the discipline.
All true. But disciplines can't make their researchers self-archive. They
can't even make them publish. Only the publish/perish carrot/stick wielded
by the researcher's institution/employer (and also the researcher's
research-funder) can do that. And the only reason the institution would
want to is because it have a shares stake in the impact of the research,
hence in maximizing it through open-access.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#institution-facilitate-filling
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#research-funders-do
(But tell me how you think *disciplines* can facilitate and accelerate
self-archiving and open access and I am ready to be won back to
discipline-based self-archiving!)
They can't, and I don't advocate discipline-based self-archiving. As I
suggested in an earlier post:
> The simplest way to aggregate papers within disciplines would be include a
> discipline field in the metadata.
This simple device would facilitate aggregation by discipline without
requiring that the paper be archived by the discipline.
> I admire your clear-headed concentration on the primary goal of open
> access. But surely the usefulness of open access can be increased by
> simultaneously developing some additional features.
All sorts of features are possible. But they all depend on one thing,
and that is content: Until we get the archives *filled*, the other
features and desiderata are rather beside the point.
I have argued against classification schemes because I think they are
a waste of time, delaying self-archiving till we come up with the "right"
classification scheme, instead of just going ahead and self-archiving.
I also think they are trivial, in today's age of algorithmic sorting of
full-text content.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#26.Classification
Agreed, but as noted in a previous exchange:
> This gets back to the problems of subject
> classification, but at the discipline level a short list of defined
> discipline descriptors should be sufficient.
A *very* short list. Because once I have narrowed it to "Ecology," the
rest is best done with boolean full-text search and algorithms rather than
prefabricated human classification schemes.
But how many such high-level (useful) partitions do you think
there really are, within, say, "Biology"? I suspect we are talking about
a very small number; the rest is boolean content-based search. (Besides,
it is not just *journals* we are classifying, as in the old aggregator
days, but *papers*.)
I'd say that Biology could usefully be partitioned into as few as four
disciplines.
Lee Miller
