Bringing scholarly communication in kicking and screaming into the Internet age

1
Bringing scholarly communication in kicking and
screaming into the Internet age

• Thomas Krichel
• http//openlib.org/home/krichel

2
Structure of this talk

• Digital libraries for scholarly communication
• why
• what
• which
• The example of RePEc
• Digital libraries for Basque Studies

3
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

4
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!

5
Some disciplines have organised DLs

• arXiv.org
• NCSTRL
• CCSB
• RePEc

6
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

7
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

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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

9
ReP Ec

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

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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.

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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

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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

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RePEc is used in many services

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

• IDEAS
• RuPEc
• EDIRC
• HoPEc

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describes documents

• Template-Type ReDIF-Paper 1.0
• Title Dynamic Aspect of Growth and Fiscal Policy
• Author-Name Thomas Krichel
• Author-Person RePEcper1965-06-05thomas_kriche
  l
• Author-Email T.Krichel_at_surrey.ac.uk
• Author-Name Paul Levine
• Author-Email P.Levine_at_surrey.ac.uk
• Author-WorkPlace-Name University of Surrey
• Classification-JEL C61 E21 E23 E62 O41
• File-URL ftp//www.econ.surrey.ac.uk/
  pub/RePEc/sur/surrec/surrec9601.pdf
• File-Format application/pdf
• Creation-Date 199603
• Revision-Date 199711
• Handle RePEcsursurrec9601

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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
• England
• Email t.krichel_at_surrey.ac.uk
• Homepage http//gretel.econ.surrey.ac.uk
• Workplace-Institution RePEcedidesuruk
• Author-Paper RePEcsursurrec9801
• Author-Paper RePEcsursurrec9601
• Author-Paper RePEcrpcrdfdocconcepts
• Author-Paper RePEcrpcrdfdocReDIF
• Handle RePEcper1965-06-05THOMAS_KRICHEL

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describes institutions (EDIRC)

• Template-Type ReDIF-Institution 1.0
• Primary-Name University of Surrey
• Primary-Location Guildford
• Secondary-Name Department of Economics
• Secondary-Phone [phone]
• Secondary-Email economics_at_surrey.ac.uk
• Secondary-Fax [phone]
• Secondary-Postal Guildford, Surrey GU2 5XH
• Secondary-Homepage
• http//www.econ.surrey.ac.uk/
• Handle RePEcedidesuruk

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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.

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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