Co-opting “Official” Channels through Infrastructures for Openness | The Scholarly Kitchen

abernard102@gmail.com 2016-03-05

Summary:

"Last week, the news broke about a new service called DOAI that is designed to support open access. It is not a publishing model or a repository but rather a type of infrastructure. When a user inputs a DOI, DOAI connects the user to a freely available copy of the publication. This is the latest of a series of developments in terms of infrastructure and services in support of open access. Over the years, the Kitchen has provided extensive coverage to the discussion about open access issues. Much of the discussion has turned on publishing models. Should traditional publishers offer gold open access, and what is the likelihood that their models will flip altogether to gold? What are the rights associated with green open access, and when can that model work effectively? What risks are there from the so-called predatory publishers, and how is this affecting the marketplace overall? While open access is surely a matter of publishing, it is no less a matter of workflows. Researchers need to encounter sources in order for them to be used and to have impact. For those who seek to pull the weight of scholarly publishing in a more open direction, discovery is no less important than availability ... The database that powers DOAI is BASE, a discovery service run by Bielefeld University that indexes millions of records from repositories and other open sources around the world, and its breadth is impressive. To take a small personal example: The vast majority of my writing is via open access channels operated by Ithaka S+R. While we are in the process of obtaining DOIs for our publications, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that several of my recent publications are indexed in BASE. For example, a paper I wrote on print preservation was indexed by the University of North Texas(including the addition of descriptive metadata), which is a source of BASE. The system is distributed and as best I can tell self-organizing and looking at the breadth of sources included in BASE it seems to achieve impressive coverage. The Directory of Open Access Journals is another discovery service focused on open access materials. Because of this focus, BASE and DOAJ make more sense embedded inside of broader discovery channels. With a somewhat similar purpose, DPLA has focused as much on building its platform and API as on serving as a presence or portal of its own. Other services can incorporate the information contained in such a database and the information about open items it contains into discovery services and tools that may have broader purposes or fit into a traditional workflow. And these workflow services need not be other search engines ..."

Link:

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/03/03/coopting-official-channels/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.tools oa.dois oa.base oa.doaj oa.dpla oa.apis oa.search

Date tagged:

03/05/2016, 07:26

Date published:

03/05/2016, 02:26