Stanislav Roudavski wrote:
> At some point, I was exploring the idea of creating such a repository around
> the Expressive Space topic and set up a pilot website for this purpose. It
> is still there but empty. It is using WIKIDNX, which seemed to me a suitable
> choice. It supports keywords, export to Bib Tex and EndNote, etc.
>
As we have had several different examples of repositories and databases
I thought I should explain what I mean by the term.
Eprints (University of Southampton, UK) and Dspace (MIT) are open source
software projects set up to allow free sharing of research publications.
The are the practical expression of the Budapest Open Access Initiative
(BOAI) promoted by George Soros to encourage open access to research
outcomes. BOAI defined an approach to archiving and indexing research
publications that ensures that all BOAI repositories become part of a
global searchable database. BOAI envisaged specialist search engines
designed for academics to access this database and Google Scholar seems
to be the most successful of these (not surprising). A further link in
the chain is the Sherpa project that provides up to date advise to
authors on the copyright position of their publications - a surprising
number of publishers allow you to place reprints or preprints (subtle
difference) of your papers in open-access archives. You can find all
this stuff via Google.
So get a free copy of eprints or dspace
set it up on your university web server (takes some technical knowhow)
get all your colleagues to archive their publications with it, checking
with Sherpa if they are worried about copyright
You have a local repository that is automatically part of a global
repository
There seems to be evidence that publications available free online are
more likely to be cited than those that are not. I think Stevan Harnad
at Southampton has published or cited evidence about that.
There are commercial services which will set up an institutional
repository for you. Some universities (like mine) feel nervous about
open-source software and feel more comfortable dealing with "proper"
suppliers, that may be a British disease. The commercial product gives
the same result as doing it yourself with open-source software but it
costs more. The one we use sends me an email each month to tell me how
many people have downloaded copies of my publications, which makes me
feel good, even one or two people paying attention to your work gives
you a warm glow.
best wishes from Sheffield
Chris
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