Expertise sharing systems

This correspondence is a follow-up to [1]. His assumption is that
researchers use web-based search queries to find papers of
interest. This is so pervasive that people have a hard time conceiving
of anything else. Almost 20 years ago, I pioneered an alternative.

In 1998, I created the “NEP: New Economics Papers” service to announce
new working papers in the RePEc digital library through weekly
subject-specific reports. The reports are maintained by volunteer
editors. To help them cope with an ever-increasing inflow, I built
ernad in 2004. It was the first ever textual information retrieval
system that uses no queries whatsoever. Instead it uses data from
previous selected and non-selected papers in the reports.

In 2017 I launched “bims: BioMed News”. This is an ernad
implementation based on PubMed. PubMed churns out about 30000 new
papers a week. Users gain two benefits. First the machine-learning
results are more broader, more precise and more fun than repeated PubMed
searches. Second, the results are made publicly available as open
data. Thus users get name recognition. I like to think about NEP and
Bims as expertise sharing systems. Participation is free.

In 2022, with a 5000 euro grant from NLNet, I developed an email-based
subscription system to be used by NEP and Bims. Subscriptions are
smart. If readers subscribe to multiple reports, duplicated items are
filtered out. Thus report readers are spared repeats of the same
items, as is common on social media.

 
Reference:

Leeming, J., Nature 6 April 2023, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01011-2

Author:

Thomas Krichel
Open Library Society, Inc.
34-20 78 Street Apt. 3D
Jackson Heights, NY 11372-2572
USA
http://openlib.org/home/krichel
Email: krichel@openlib.org
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8421-6356