Use your bean. Count it.

Thomas Krichel

2005-05-14

me

I am academic economist by training.

Now an assistant professor at the Palmer School of Library and Information Science.

My main reason for complacency is the creation of RePEc, a large digital library for academic economics.

my thanks

to the organizers for inviting me

to Ebs for sending a mail that asked the right questions.

Who needs open Access?

Most scholarly authors are not concerned with how their papers are distributed.

A well-know mathematician says "My aim in life is that a few close friends begrudgingly accept that I was right".

This person needs no open access.

the caring scholar

Scholars only care about their own reputation scores.

Conceptually, we see two sources of reputation scores

source 1: once-and-for-all evaluation by a small set agent

source 2: continuous usage evaluation

In general only the first receives attention. It is more commonly known as peer review.

peer review

Almost all high-quality peer-review channels are controlled by the closed-access publishers.

Open access journals (i.e. peer-review) are 98% controlled by closed-access publishers.

Source 1 of motivation is not what we can use to push open access.

but

even with that we need to make sure that we get at least references out to outlets that may be used by the community.

this is particularly important for subject based bibliographic dataset

example: creation of RePEc archives has gone up as we have struck a collaboration with EconLit, the commercial database of the Journal.

continuous usage evaluation

This is about the only way we can motivate authors.

Open Access will lead to access.

Generic arguments such as "Online or Invisible" don't work.

Comparison with closed access is not required.

Comparison with others in the field is good. It is not required.

the most basic

If you run an open access archive, you need to count the access to the documents.

You need to mail the results of the logs to the authors.

I suggest a monthly mailing. This will be the most important service to your author and your reasons for existence.

Having logs on the Web is not good enough. You need a push technology.

problems with the most basic

You need to have your own archive available on the web.

Check if your pages are Google.

Check if intermediate providers link to a full-text local copy.

You have to aggregate papers to authors. Since there is a multiple to multiple relationship, this is not trivial.

lies, damn lies

You should derobotify.

exclude access by IP addresses that also have downloaded robots.txt.

exclude IP addresses that download a lot of documents in a short time.

exclude rapid repeat access by the IP number.

Immediate feedback counters are a bad idea. They create the image of a gimmick.

relating papers to authors

To do it well, we need a free aggregation of publication data. This will allow us to cover a lot

http://openlib.org/home/krichel

Thank you for your attention!

Use your bean? Count it.

2005-05-14T17:10:53