How to Compare IRs and CRs

[David E. Wojick]

I disagree Steve (and I am doing staff work for the US Federal Interagency Working Group that is grappling with these issues). Mind you I am all for OA, but integrating all the web accessible science is far from trivial. Google, Google Schlolar, Science.gov, Worldwidescience.org, etc., each have large, irrational hunks. It is far from clear that adding tens of thousands of independent IR's is going to help.

Also, journal articles are not my favorite content, because they tend to be one to two years after the research and are too short. I prefer conference presentations, reports, even awards and news, to journals. We are trying to speed up science and journals are the tail end of research.

So OA is a worthy cause but ony a small part of the policy picture. Findability of key information is the core issue.

BTW I did some research that suggests that 60-80% of the journal lit, or something roughly equivalent, is findable for free if you poke around long enough, in some disciplines anyway. 

David Wojick

>
>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/
>
>UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
>If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access
>to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
>    http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
>    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
>    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
>
>OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
>    BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
>    http://romeo.eprints.org/
>OR
>    BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
>    a suitable one exists.
>    http://www.doaj.org/
>AND
>    in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
>    in your own institutional repository.
>    http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
>    http://archives.eprints.org/
>    http://openaccess.eprints.org/

-- 

"David E. Wojick, PhD" <WojickD at osti.gov>
Senior Consultant for Innovation
Office of Scientific and Technical Information
US Department of Energy
http://www.osti.gov/innovation/
391 Flickertail Lane, Star Tannery, VA 22654 USA
540-858-3136

http://www.bydesign.com/powervision/resume.html provides my bio and past client list. 
http://www.bydesign.com/powervision/Mathematics_Philosophy_Science/ presents some of my own research on information structure and dynamics.