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!