On Sat, 9 Feb 2008, dwoj...@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.h tml 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/