John Smith writes
> The researchers I refer to are here. They had access to Inspec but
> simply did not use it and when asked said they did not want
> it.
All the better, cancell it.
> Basically the material it indexed was too old. In electronics and
> computing new work is announced at conferences and later written up
> as a refereed paper purely for promotion purposes.
Sure, but the same people have a free index, DBLP,
http://dblp.uni-trier.de/
to which they contribute to such an extent that the maintainer, Michael
Ley (one of the unsung heros of digital libraries), says he can't respond
to all the mails. So there is still interest in formally registring work.
That interest will not decline, since academics need to keep track of
what they did, for tenure, promotion etc.
> Finally they are experts in their field so do not need the filtering
> provided by referees, journals and high quality indexes.
Yes, but people still need to know about new developments in a
field.
> I wonder if indexing services like Inspec can continue.
They can't.
> It is an excellent index because it uses a lot of human input to add
> value (classification codes, controlled indexing terms, etc) but
> such work is expensive but if researchers don't use it who is going
> to pay for it?
No, you don't need to pay people to build such a service. I have
done it in RePEc with just volunteers. My volunteers classify all
new working papers in RePEc, about 300 to 500 papers a week. They
are aided by machine learning software. For the resulting service,
see
http://nep.repec.org
and for a description of the report composition software
http://openlib.org/home/krichel/work/altai.html
This generates a simple, but effective classification. We could
have more classes if we have more volunteers, no big deal. And
we can react quickly as new fields arise. There is a report
on neuroeconomics, surely a field that did not exist when I was
an economics lecturer. When I first saw this I thought somebody
was taking the mickey ;-)
Data from NEP, together with author registration and institution
data can be used to map individuals and institutional work areas.
This is stuff that Inspec can't do because it does not have such
registration.
RePEc was supported by the JISC E-LIB program through the WoPEc
project, and is still running very strong.
Cheers,
Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel
RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
phone: +7 383 330 6813 skype: thomaskrichel
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