Bringing scholarly communication in kicking and screaming into the Internet

age

Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel

Structure of this talk

• Digital libraries for scholarly communication– why– what– which

• The example of RePEc• Digital libraries for Basque Studies

Digital Libraries (DL)

• Organised collections of digital contents• Often accessible over the Internet• Allow synchronous access to data by any

number of users• Of interest to scholars because they allow them

to exchange information• provide an alternative to commercial publication

DL may avoid the Faustian Bargain

• Scholars produce work for free.• Scholars review for free.• Scholars buy back their own work from the

publishers.• Academics pay twice!

Some disciplines have organised DLs

• arXiv.org• NCSTRL • CCSB• RePEc

arXiv.org

• Founded by Paul Ginsparg in 1991• based at Los Alamos National Laboratory• completely centralised collection• many mirrors of the archive • over 120,000 papers

NCSTRL

• Stands for Networked Computer Science Technical Report Library

• uses a software that implements a distributed protocol called Dienst

• has about 10,000 papers online• shares a common set called CORR

Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies

• Uses BibTeX bibliographies snarfed of the Internet

• Extensive efforts to remove duplicate records• gives access to over 30,000 documents• lacks a coherent structure

RePEc

• Decentralised• Contributors only use standard protocols• Is not limited to document but aims to describe

the whole discipline

RePEc principle

• Many archives – archives offer metadata about digital objects (mainly working

papers)• One database

– The data from all archives forms one single logical database despite the fact that it is held on different servers.

• Many services – users can access the data through many interfaces. – providers of archives offer their data to all interfaces at the

same time. This provides for an optimal distribution.

RePEc is based on 130+ archives

• WoPEc• EconWPA• DEGREE• S-WoPEc• NBER• CEPR

• US Fed in Print• IMF• OECD• MIT• University of Surrey• CO PAH

…to form one dataset...

• over 80,000 items in over 1,000 series, contains working paper, published paper, software, personal and institutional data

• largest distributed free source about online scientific publications, over 23,000 electronic papers

RePEc is used in many services

• BibEc and WoPEc• Decomate Z39.50 service• NEP: New Economics Papers• Inomics

• IDEAS• RuPEc• EDIRC• HoPEc

… describes documentsTemplate-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0Title: Dynamic Aspect of Growth and Fiscal PolicyAuthor-Name: Thomas Krichel Author-Person: RePEc:per:1965-06-

05:thomas_krichelAuthor-Email: T.Krichel@surrey.ac.uk Author-Name: Paul Levine Author-Email: P.Levine@surrey.ac.uk Author-WorkPlace-Name: University of SurreyClassification-JEL: C61; E21; E23; E62; O41 File-URL: ftp://www.econ.surrey.ac.uk/

pub/RePEc/sur/surrec/surrec9601.pdf File-Format: application/pdfCreation-Date: 199603 Revision-Date: 199711 Handle: RePEc:sur:surrec:9601

… describes persons (HoPEc)Template-Type: ReDIF-Person 1.0 Name-Full: KRICHEL, THOMAS Name-First: THOMAS Name-Last: KRICHEL Postal: 1 Martyr Court 10 Martyr Road Guildford GU1 4LF EnglandEmail: t.krichel@surrey.ac.ukHomepage: http://gretel.econ.surrey.ac.ukWorkplace-Institution: RePEc:edi:desurukAuthor-Paper: RePEc:sur:surrec:9801Author-Paper: RePEc:sur:surrec:9601Author-Paper: RePEc:rpc:rdfdoc:conceptsAuthor-Paper: RePEc:rpc:rdfdoc:ReDIFHandle: RePEc:per:1965-06-05:THOMAS_KRICHEL

… describes institutions (EDIRC)

Template-Type: ReDIF-Institution 1.0 Primary-Name: University of SurreyPrimary-Location: GuildfordSecondary-Name: Department of EconomicsSecondary-Phone: (01483) 259380Secondary-Email: economics@surrey.ac.ukSecondary-Fax: (01483) 259548Secondary-Postal: Guildford, Surrey GU2 5XHSecondary-Homepage: http://www.econ.surrey.ac.uk/Handle: RePEc:edi:desuruk

The RePEc vision• It is a collaborative effort of community wide-knowledge

sharing by discpline champions and librarians. The relational features allow to share the burden of cataloguing and reduce the cost of keeping the collection up-to-date.

• Once a critical mass of data and user services is reached outsiders face strong incentives to contribute.

• RePEc promotes free exchange of data between academics.• It fights the appropriation of scientific material through the

“Faustian Bargain” of academics and publishers.

Digital Library for Basque Studies?

• Building large corpus of free Basque texts• look at project Gutenberg• publish research papers online and keep a

central index• Set up a relational database that links the

primary texts in the corpus to research material that is written about them