Regarding "One problem with gateways, aggregators, etc. is that they like to think they are special, and so don’t put the effort into facilitating other gateways/aggregators to use the fruits of their labours."

I think that gateways/aggregators sometimes (often, even?) start out with the good intention of providing an interface to allow themselves to become a 'source' in further aggregations... but then they discover this is not so simple to support and sustain. As it is usually thought of as a courtesy, rather than as a primary objective, this functionality is then rarely properly developed or deployed.

Paul

On 28 Oct 2013, at 10:43, Hugh Glaser <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi Arthur,
> Thanks for bearing with me.
> 
> On 27 Oct 2013, at 22:41, Arthur Sale <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
> 
> Hugh
> 
> Maybe I was not clear. Trove is a 'gateway' for research articles or a 'Virtual Open Repository'. It harvests and mirrors the metadata of Australia's research repositories, but it does not copy the content.
> Ah - so it does exactly what I meant!
> If you want to look at full-text files, you get taken to the original source in a repository. In some other materials it does actually store the full texts, since for example the NLA runs the National Film Archives and Website Repository.
> Yes, I now can see better that Trove is more of a ‘gateway’.
> Previously I had looked at stuff which at best led to citebase (and which then 404’ed at http://adsabs.harvard.edu).
> So all I ever got to see was stuff being served from Trove.
> I also found some papers that had come from Australian repositories, but didn’t easily manage to get to them.
> No I have a better example, I think.
> However, I think there was tiny little problem with the UI that mislead me:
> When I look at
> http://trove.nla.gov.au/article/result?q=Improving+remote+collaborative+process+modelling+using+embodiment+in+3D+virtual+environments
> I see
> [cid:F87883C9-F576-463F-9FE8-35FD19016AF5]View online
> At QUT Inst Rep
> Perhaps unsurprisingly I clicked on the second of these, which takes me to a record in Trove.
> Had I clicked on the line above, I would have gone to the repository record.
> The National Library diluted OA when it merged all its database products, so I won't defend it too far. It is good, but not perfect. It is a work in progress. Also Trove does a lot more than provide access to OA.
> It may not be perfect, but it is certainly more than just good :-)
> 
> To add a little bit, our two research councils have recently created funder mandates with a one year max embargo, but these apply only to research funded by them. Maybe 25% of Australian universities have internal (all research) mandates.
> 
> Four other things:
> 
> ·       Yes global is better than local, so Trove is mainly of value for access to expected Australian content, like platypuses, koalas, eucalypts, The Southern Ocean, Captain James Cook, compulsory voting, etc. In the long run, such gateways may be useful to create global super-gateways, as mentioned in this thread. Act local, think global?
> 
> 
> ·       As to custom search engines (merging repositories), yes they exist. I have made up several for example AuseSearch https://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=012189697858739272261:yyyqychcumo. Go look for 'Google custom search engine' for instructions on setting one up. Easy.
> Nice.
> 
> 
> ·       As to OAI-PMH harvesting, yes Trove does provide it (I checked), and uses OAI-PMH to harvest much other information (than research) and make it available too.
> Thanks, yes, I know that it uses OAI-PMH to harvest - what it doesn’t do, as far as I can tell, is publish OAI-PMH, which was the point I was making.
> One problem with gateways, aggregators, etc. is that they like to think they are special, and so don’t put the effort into facilitating other gateways/aggregators to use the fruits of their labours.
> 
> 
> ·       Gold articles are in repositories too, though sensibly not as full-text, but usually a link to the Gold journal entry. This is what our funders suggest as appropriate and they are right.
> Best
> Hugh
> 
> 
> Arthur Sale
> 
> University of Tasmania
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hugh Glaser [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Sunday, 27 October 2013 10:36 PM
> To: Neil Jacobs; Arthur Sale
> Cc: <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Open Mirror?
> 
> I’ve put the following on http://openmirror.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2013/10/22/the-open-mirror-a-feasibility-study/#comments although it won’t show up yet.
> 
> ====================================
> 
> Interesting times.
> 
> Depending on what would be provided, this could very well be an expensive activity, with significant ongoing costs, so it is good to ask whether it is wanted, useful etc..
> 
> It could also be deeply disruptive to the OA process, while it is still at a very delicate stage.
> 
> My view is that something like aggregators are useful, even essential, to get value out of all this work that contributors and repository providers are doing.
> 
> But these are not “mirrors”.
> 
> For want of a better description I will use Virtual Open Repository (VOR), rather than mirror or aggregator.
> 
> Skip to *** if you get bored.
> 
> Mirroring is nearly always wrong on the Web, other than for performance &c..
> 
> A big point about the Web is that you don’t go around copying data and republishing it; it is already available somewhere, and you point at it. If you copy it, you incur problems and costs associated with synchronisation and other things.
> 
> You may need to go and get the data, so that you can add value and then publish metadata, but, like Google etc you then point at the original, which is what people want (although because you have the pages you can provide a cache for when things go wrong (preservation service)).
> 
> So what I would like to see is something that provides the facilities that add value to the UK research output, while definitely not being a mirror.
> 
> Technically it might do all the things a mirror needs to do (for example because it would need to harvest the texts to do text mining), but it would lead users to the articles in the repository archives, not its own copies.
> 
> This is in contrast, I think, to systems such as http://www.researchgate.net and http://trove.nla.gov.au/ (amazing resource!) and indeed http://www.mendeley.com/, which can actually make it quite hard, or almost impossible to get back to the original source.
> 
> An interesting thing about these systems is that they are very user/searcher oriented (which is great).
> 
> However, this means that they take less cognisance of the interests of the repository provider.
> 
> What is the end game of where content should be offered?
> 
> Will repository providers be able to justify their costs if there is no visibility?
> 
> We are still at a very delicate stage of this process, and something like this can deeply upset the socio-technical landscape - what point in the expense of a repository if institution managers can simply tell people to deposit directly into the mirror?
> 
> And if asked, why would a mirror funded by JISC refuse to offer such a service?
> 
> I suspect that Arthur is right, and Trove is quite close to the concept in your question, although over a much wider range of material.
> 
> Studying what is going right and wrong with Trove would be good, although things like government mandates for publication vary between countries.
> 
> Of course, another question is what should be publicly-funded and what should be left to the private sector for added value?
> 
> And how should public funding support the system.
> 
> I favour something that provides a view over UK repositories which provides basic and some more sophisticated facilities (such as text mining), but does not seek to go to the level of things like Trove.
> 
> ***
> 
> An initiative of this sort could provide a polished VOR, that provides a view over a range of repositories chosen by the VOR publisher.
> 
> (There may actually be such things - I stopped looking a while ago - sorry if that is the case.) I could be deployed by anyone, to provide a VOR over whatever content they wanted, especially if it was possible to choose individual repository records or searches as inputs.
> 
> But why restrict to geographical VORs?
> 
> Thus the same software could be used to provide a VOR over Physics or North Sea fish or whatever else a special interest group might want.
> 
> And why only one level?
> 
> Having a VOR for Cornwall, the South-East, England, UK, EU, Europe might well be useful.
> 
> And any VOR should itself publish as if it was a repository (sorry, Arthur, it seems Trove doesn’t publish OAI-PMH :-(), so that it can be consumed.
> 
> I now see Elly’s message about http://www.narcis.nl/ - it seems to me that this is much more what I would like to see.
> 
> A lightweight way of getting to things.
> 
> This would achieve all the objectives you outline, without disrupting things, and the costs might be kept down.
> 
> It would also be less likely to become a single point of failure in hard times.
> 
> I would also say that it should be made Open Source, and JISC could use its position to initiate an exciting community for what is a much-needed facility.
> 
> What about JISC getting together with NARCIS and any others to kick start a community project?
> 
> Or just starting itself.
> 
> JISC would need to put resources into writing the core code, but there are many around the world that would join once the credibility has risen.
> 
> And companies would get involved and contribute, so that they could then sell added-value services.
> 
> This could be a real opportunity to move the OA world on towards the vision that many of us have!
> 
> Sorry to go on so long - I do get excited by this stuff, and couldn’t stop typing.
> 
> Hugh
> 
> On 26 Oct 2013, at 23:16, Arthur Sale <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> Australia has aggregated its repositories for at least five years through a gateway (longer for PhD theses). Go see http://trove.nla.gov.au/ and choose journal articles, or books. Note that you can optionally see all metadata entries or restrict a search to items with online text.
> 
>> 
> 
>> There is also an API you can download if you want to do secondary crawling, available to registered users. It also has an OAI-PMH interface, or used to.
> 
>> 
> 
>> Searchers for data would far prefer to deal with a gateway (like Trove or BASE) than individual repositories.
> 
>> 
> 
>> Arthur Sale
> 
>> University of Tasmania
> 
>> 
> 
>> From: Repositories discussion list
> 
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Nick Sheppard
> 
>> Sent: Sunday, 27 October 2013 12:38 AM
> 
>> To: [log in to unmask]
> 
>> Subject: Re: Open Mirror?
> 
>> 
> 
>> In the uk (and internationally) repositories are "diluted" with
> 
>> metadata records, I understand open mirror is predicated on
> 
>> aggregating full text content. See
> 
>> alsohttp://core-project.kmi.open.ac.uk/projects
> 
>> 
> 
>> Nick
> 
>> 
> 
>> Neil Jacobs writes
> 
>> 
> 
>>> Jisc is conducting a feasibility study into the “Open Mirror”, which
> 
>>> would provide access for the world to the open access research
> 
>>> outputs from UK researchers.
> 
>> 
> 
>>  If you want to reuse materials for UK respositories, you could
> 
>>  use that special repo, but it would create a new layer of
> 
>>  duplication and confusion. For somebody like me who wants
> 
>>  to collect world-wide metadata about scholarly works, I
> 
>>  don't seem a point in dealing with the aggreator rather
> 
>>  than individual repositories. There may be some point to
> 
>>  this if other countries would follow suit, but, for some
> 
>>  countries it's very unlikely to ever take off.
> 
>> 
> 
>> --
> 
>> 
> 
>>  Cheers,
> 
>> 
> 
>>  Thomas Krichel                  http://openlib.org/home/krichel
> 
>>                                              skype:thomaskrichel
> 
> --
> 
> Hugh
> 
> 023 8061 5652
> 
> 
> --
> Hugh
> 023 8061 5652
> 

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Paul Walk
http://www.paulwalk.net
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