Arthur Sale wrote: > Hey, let's be realistic. For most purposes text plus pictures is adequate. > Add videos if you must. Your average repository can cope with all that, > integrated into a pdf. We've probably got 95% coverage. One cannot easily > search pictures or video, but must rely on metadata and surrounding clues. > Most repositories can accept any file format but they are disconnected from > the object of choice, and are not displayed or searchable. > > In some fields, like protein geometry, DNA sequences, crystallography, > architecture and even computer science that is inadequate. In these cases a > repository that has the ability to display and search formats that no-one > else can is invaluable to the researchers, especially if they can index them > by structure. So what we are talking about are objects that are NOT > reducible to readable paper. Focus on that. If you want to search > crystallographic structure, Google is not only hopeless but useless. As long > as they exist, subject repositories have a place (a large place). I am not > writing that institutional repositories are not good, but they are not the > answer to the world's problems yet. Keep using them, but recognise that > there is a significant scope for specialized repositories.
My focus is on the papers. The text and images published in the peer reviewed journal literature. For that, but the whole of that (all subjects, all papers), I contend that institutional repositories, with deposit of the paper mandated by the institution and funders, is the quickest and simplest route to universal gratis OA. If we receive that before I clock out I can assure you that I will be involved in the push for expanding that openness, but I have yet to see a mechanism that scales to all fields better than institutional and funder mandates for IR-deposit (plus whatever data deposit individual discplines mandate, with simple cross-deposit of papers where feasible). For specific fields there are areas of highly structured data that could and should be put into disciplinary archives, and linked across to papers that use/refer to that data. These archives are best centrally-run by a non-profit scholarly body. Papers that reference data in that can easily be deposited locally and then the central data repository can either have the paper pushed to it or pull the meta-data and link back to the IR for the full-text (with access button request if needed by publisher embargoes). I do not disagree on this. However, the push for central discipline-specific repositories being the mandated locus of deposit for papers does not scale to all disciplines because not all disciplines have a need of a data repository, not all disciplines have a cohesive enough body to run one and many disciplines have very fuzzy edges. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
