On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 1:42 PM, Dan Brickley <[email protected]> wrote:
[snip]
Thought experiment: what if authors posted to their personal sites,
but with enough metadata (e.g. http://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle)
for generic (rather than topical/institutional) search engine
discovery to be feasible?
I'm generally in favour of schema.org because I think it will succeed and will
be simple enough to be used.
However there are at least the following problems for #scholpub.
* The websites are impermanent. "Personal" = departmental pages ? or family
pages? both (and other variants are extremely prone to decay
* There are no rights. Therefore it is essential that the author gives the
right at least to copy. No institutional repository would take the risk of
perserving anything outside. It might violate copyright.
* It is unclear who if anyone would archive this. Not universities. National
libraries, yes - but this is very patchy and is probably locked away in dark
archives. It might otherwise violate copyright.
* It is undiscoverable. So without an index the usage would be appallingly
low. Of course there is the academic's friend Google. But we aren't paying
them anything for this and the traffic isn't worth much. They probably don't
want to offend big publishers because they get income from them. I know
another academic search engine which worries about this
* Certain publishers forbid it. So it has to be "illegal". Many academics
don't like doing illegal things.
Mind you a strong lead from senior academics could change this. But the number
of senior academics trying to change the system is almost negligible, so we have
to take Planck's approach and wait till they die. And even then they are
training their successors to be just as illiberal.
So even if 100% of authors do this, and they won't (chemistry??) it's a grey
archive at best.
The best chance I think is to create completely disruptive business models and
tools - and who knows, schema.org might be part of that even without the
academics involvement
--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
[ Part 2: "Attached Text" ]
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