Open Archives and Free Online Scholarship Thomas Krichel (RePEc & Long Island University) Simeon M. Warner (ArXiv & Cornell University)

Author background Krichel Trained economist 1984 to 2000 Worked on electronic dissemination of academic papers in Economics since 1993 Now works a Professor for Library and Information Science Background as an activist of free online scholarship

Author background: Warner Trained electrical engineer Researcher in the Physics department at Syracuse University Now works for arXiv, the Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science eprint archive, formerly at Los Alamos, now at Cornell University

What is this paper about? The topic –Author self-archiving –Academic disintermediation –Free online scholarship –Academic self-documentation The way we address the topic –from a practitioners point of view –from a activists point of view

The basic idea Scholars are not paid for writing scholarly papers. –Simply a historical fact –We assume that this will not change as we move into a more online/digital future Publishers appropriate copyright to sell one academic the output that is freely given up by another. Socially inefficient

Harnad Steady State Analysis Toll-gated academic publishing in the Gutenberg world Post-Gutenberg world leads to abolition of toll-gates

The dynamics do matter Toll-gated layer exists publisher editors scholarly societies A free layer is slowly starting –how to create prepublication tradition –how is the system to be funded –which organizational model discipline-based institution-based

Institution-based initiatives Idea: libraries of universities should make papers from all disciplines available on institutional servers Problem: low incentives for academics to collaborate –prime solidarity of scholar with discipline –no preprint tradition

Putting it up on the web Prepublication by individuals over the web is an important step Problems are: –stability of document existence and location, thus impossible to use as a building block for a review of any kind –information retrieval difficulties –no certification of finding

Discipline-based systems For the time being, they only work in the preprint disciplines –Mathematics –Physics leading to centralized systems and in the working paper disciplines –Computer science –Economics leading to decentralized systems

RePEc Comprehensive academic self-documentation system in fact, the very essence of an academic self- documentation system –run decentrally by academic volunteers –comprehensive picture of academic output activity originates with WoPEc project founded by Thomas Krichel in 1993

arXiv Too well-known to talk about here So I will talk more about RePEc

RePEc principle Many archives –archives offer metadata about digital objects (mainly working papers) One database –The data from all archives forms one single logical database despite the fact that it is held on different servers. Many services –users can access the data through many interfaces. –providers of archives offer their data to all interfaces at the same time. This provides for an optimal distribution.

RePEc is based on 190+ archives WoPEc EconWPA DEGREE S-WoPEc NBER CEPR US Fed in Print IMF OECD MIT University of Surrey CO PAH

…to form one dataset... over 140,000 items in over 1,000 series, contains working paper, published paper, software, personal and institutional data largest distributed free source about online scientific publications, over 45,000 electronic papers data is encoded using the purpose-built ReDIF format all archives follow a convention called the Guildford protocol on how to store ReDIF files and other data on their servers. Therefore the archives can be mirrored.

… describes documents Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0 Title: Dynamic Aspect of Growth and Fiscal Policy Author-Name: Thomas Krichel Author-Person: RePEc:per: :thomas_krichel Author- Author-Name: Paul Levine Author- Author-WorkPlace-Name: University of Surrey Classification-JEL: C61; E21; E23; E62; O41 File-URL: ftp:// pub/RePEc/sur/surrec/surrec9601.pdf File-Format: application/pdf Creation-Date: Revision-Date: Handle: RePEc:sur:surrec:9601

… describes persons (HoPEc) Template-Type: ReDIF-Person 1.0 Name-Full: KRICHEL, THOMAS Name-First: THOMAS Name-Last: KRICHEL Postal: 1 Martyr Court 10 Martyr Road Guildford GU1 4LF England Homepage: Workplace-Institution: RePEc:edi:desuruk Author-Paper: RePEc:sur:surrec:9801 Author-Paper: RePEc:sur:surrec:9601 Author-Paper: RePEc:rpc:rdfdoc:concepts Author-Paper: RePEc:rpc:rdfdoc:ReDIF Handle: RePEc:per: :THOMAS_KRICHEL

… describes institutions (EDIRC) Template-Type: ReDIF-Institution 1.0 Primary-Name: University of Surrey Primary-Location: Guildford Secondary-Name: Department of Economics Secondary-Phone: (01483) Secondary- Secondary-Fax: (01483) Secondary-Postal: Guildford, Surrey GU2 5XH Secondary-Homepage: Handle: RePEc:edi:desuruk

Weaknesses of RePEc No funding Difficult to grasp innovative concepts –relational database for the academic process –plethora of user and contributor services Setting-up costs are large, constant attention required Little support from the top of the academic food chain

Open Archives Initiative Most important for Free Online Scholarship is the implicit shift in business model towards institution-based archiving.

Academic Metadata Format Data and metadata for action. Librarians have only documented the world; what matters is to change it. Tool for academic self-documentation –simple to compose –drop-in functionality with OAI intuition that comes from natural language

AMF View of the world Author self-archiving will work if it is part of the advertisement of academics Creator has to be the descriptive focus, not the creation

A model of AMF instances Persons Institutions Collections Resources –Text This is what is really important about AMF

Natural language Nouns –person, organization, collection, text Adjective like –name, title, status, etc Verbs like –isauthorof, hassponsor, ispartof etc

Example 1 Simeon M. Warner AMF Design in brief ome/krichel/southampton_ _1.ppt

id and ref For propeller head use. Records (instances of nouns) that are authoritative can have an id. Non-authoritative records can refer to authoritative ones, using a ref.

Example 2

Business Model: peer review to impact review Understanding that peer-review is part of the Gutenberg universe Impact review should be promoted –Access logs –Download logs –Citation counts Impact review promotes open access

A model of tasks Deposit Describe Identify Relate

OAI and task model Free online scholarship through open archives doing the first two tasks. Aggregators will be needed to perform the two other tasks. Can also use the OAI protocols.

AMF and task model AMF appears as a basic framework for aggregators to communicate with basic data providers and export data. But maybe an RDF-based implementation of the AMF vocabulary may be better as an internal format to be used by the aggregator.

Vielen Dank!