How to Compare IRs and CRs

[Stevan Harnad]

On Sat, 9 Feb 2008, dwojick at hughes.net wrote:

> Steve, I am concerned when you say the following -- 
>> "It's from the local repositories that the local produce can then be
>> "harvested" (the limitations of a mixed metaphor!) to some central
>> site, if desired, or just straight to an indexer like Google Scholar
>> or Citebase."
>
> OA in 10's of 1,000's of IRs is virtually worthless without some very
> good, central, global, search capability. How to build this capability
> is far from clear.
>
> David Wojick
> http://www.osti.gov

The answer is as simple as it is certain: OA's problem today is *content*
not *search*.

What is missing is 85+% of OA's target content (2.5M annual articles
in 25K peer-reviewed journals), not the means of searching it! Current
search power -- both implemented and under development -- is orders of
magnitude richer than the OA database for which it is intended.

Figure out a way to fill all the world's university IRs with 100% of
their annual article output, and the rest is a piece of cake.

Keep fussing about the dessert when there's still no main course, and
you have a recipe for prolonging the hunger of your esteemed guests
even longer than they've already endured it (for over a decade and a
half to date).

(The way is already figured out, by the way: it's the institutional
Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate. What still needs effort is getting the
universities to go ahead and adopt them, instead of waiting passively,
while fussing instead about preservation, copyright, publishing reform,
-- and improved search engines!)

Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/

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