Monday, March 28, 2005

directory of open access repositories

Something is beginning that could be useful:

A new service is starting development to support the rapidly emerging movement towards Open Access to research information. The new service, called DOAR - the Directory of Open Access Repositories - will categorise and list the wide variety of Open Access research archives that have grown up around the world. Such repositories have mushroomed over the last 2 years in response to calls by scholars and researchers worldwide to provide open access to research information. More about it.

Wonder though, why not find a way to catalog these databases into, say OCLC?

Thursday, March 17, 2005

How much time would you have to spend to keep your work readily available?

Stevan Harnad and Leslie Carr, Univ. of Southhampton, have posted a paper titled Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving
(http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/)
from the abstract:
A common objection to self-archiving is that it is an extra task that puts an unnecessary burden on each researcher. In particular, the need to enter the extra bibliographic metadata demanded by repositories for accurate searching and identification is presumed to be a particularly onerous task. This paper describes a preliminary study on two months of submissions for a mature repository and concludes that the amount of time spent entering metadata would be as little as 40 minutes per year for a highly active researcher.