On 12 Jul 2010, at 06:25, Leslie Chan wrote: > This is rather circular. The view that academic papers should be fixed in > form and format is rather out of sync with the emergence of new forms of > scholarly expression enabled by the web. I don't wish to argue that academic writing SHOULD BE fixed in format, merely to observe that IT IS predominantly so.
> " Academics should be encouraged to > explore a heterogeneous range of formats, reaching different audiences and > finding new ways to write about research." When they do, we'll find a way to measure it :-) If you believe they are in a significant way, let's do it! > I think this discussion raises a fundamental question about the design of > IRs and their support for scholarship. IRs must do better to capture the > diversity of scholarly contribution and formats, and make them count in > meaningful way. I wholeheartedly concur. > Do we really need more output based comparisons? We need a range of comparisons of many sorts to get as full a picture as possible. > How should we define the most "useful"? Should download and other usage > stats be taken into consideration, instead of only in-bound links? If we had access to those statistics, by all means lets use them. > Why wait for Microsoft? What has the the open source community be doing on > this front? What about OpenOffice? Any good open source NLM DTD conversion > tools out there? Why has it taken so long? If there was something for open office then it would be trivial for repositories to apply it to Microsoft Word documents. -- Les Carr
