[GOAL] Re: Paperity launched. The 1st multidisciplinary aggregator of OA journals & papers

Mon Oct 13 18:45:43 BST 2014

On Oct 13, 2014, at 1:06 PM, Marcin Wojnarski <mwojnarski at paperity.org> wrote:

> Repositories are not an authoritative source of metadata about paper-journal relation.
> Metadata is put there by authors themselves and it can be missing, incomplete or
> erroneous, in extreme cases even fake. Thus in practice repository collections are
> flat even if metadata is present.

Are you looking for “authoritative metadata” or metadata of OA journal articles?

The majority of OA journal articles are Green, not Gold. Focussing on the Gold
because it is more “authoritative” calls to mind the joke about the drunkard who
prefers to keep looking for his keys by the lamp-post because it is brighter there.

> If you think that finding Green articles is impossible, then you shall not be surprised that
> we focus on Gold first, right?

I certainly did not say it was impossible! (We do it all the time! So does Google Scholar.) 
I only said it was not as easy as it is to just go to DOAJ journal websites (the lamp-post)
for only the Gold.

And I think the preoccupation with “authoritative” sources of metadata is monumentally
misplaced. (In fact, the notion of “aggregation” is probably obsolescent too): we have journal
articles all over the web, and all that’s needed is a way to find them. Google Scholar’s
pretty good, and can potentially be made even better. But what’s missing now is not
a better harvester or more “authoritative” metadata, but more OA articles (whether
Gold or Green). Only about 30% of journal articles published today are OA (the majority 
of it Green). The fastest and surest (and cheapest) way to provide the remaining 70% is 
to mandate and provide Green.

Stevan Harnad

> On 10/13/2014 02:14 PM, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>> On Oct 12, 2014, at 4:50 PM, Marcin Wojnarski <mwojnarski at paperity.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> Dear Stevan,
>>> We started with Gold, because we believe that journals play a fundamental role in the system
>>> of scholarly communication and every service that tries to facilitate access to literature must
>>> start with journals, not only with a flat collection of papers like the one found in repositories.
>> 
>> Dear Marcin,
>> 
>> I think there may be a fundamental misunderstanding here.
>> 
>> Green OA consists of self-archived journal articles and their bibliographic metadata — including
>> journal name.
>> 
>> And institutional repositories consist of an institution’s journal article output.
>> 
>> Nothing “flat” about those!
>> 
>> Were you perhaps thinking that repositories just contain unpublished preprints and gray
>> literature?
>> 
>>> For 400 years, journals have been the backbone of the system, the main structural element.
>> 
>> I don’t understand why you are pointing this out: From the very outset the Open Access movement 
>> has been very specifically about opening access to journal articles. Please see the original BOAI statement:
>> http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read
>> 
>> "The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars 
>> give to the world without expectation of payment. Primarily, this category 
>> encompasses their peer-reviewed journal articles…"
>> 
>>> They provide a brand name for papers, create consistent editoral policy and take responsibility
>>> for the quality and relevance of articles they publish - these features are of topmost importance
>>> for readers, without them navigating through millions of articles becomes infeasible.
>> 
>> Marcin, it remains clear why you are telling us this. We all know it. What I asked you was:
>> 
>>>> Harvesting Gold OA journal articles is a piece of cake. How will Paperity/redex harvest
>> 
>>>> Green OA articles published in non-OA journals but made OA somewhere on the
>> 
>>>> Web 
>> 
>>> That said, we're fully aware how much great unique content there is in repositories and we’d
>>> like very much to merge these two streams - Gold and Green - in Paperity at some point.
>> 
>> The great unique content in repositories is the very same great unique content that there is in journals.
>> Gold OA and Green OA both consist of journal articles. There are many more non-Gold journals
>> and non-Gold journal-articles than Gold ones. 
>> 
>> Why is Paperity focusing on Gold?
>> 
>> Why is all the rest only to be merged "at some point”?
>> 
>> And how, exactly?
>> 
>>> Although there are some tensions inside OA community between the Gold and Green camps,
>>> I think they are unjustified, because these routes are complementary, not competitive.
>> 
>> You are quite right, the two roads to OA are complementary, not competitive.
>> 
>> But in order to complement one another they must both be clearly understood, and much
>> of the tension is about misunderstandings, for example, that OA = Gold OA while Green OA
>> is about something else (preprints, gray literature).
>> 
>> And another point of tension is about priorities: Which needs to come first, Gold or Green?
>> 
>> (My own reply is that it is for many important reasons Green that must come first: (1) because 
>> Green does not cost the author money, (2) because Green  can be mandated by institutions and 
>> funders, and (3) because by coming first Green will make subscriptions unsustainable, force
>> journals to cut obsolete costs, downsize to providing peer review alone, and convert to
>> to affordable, sustainable, Fair Gold instead of today’s over-priced, double-paid pre-Green Fools Gold.
>> http://j.mp/fairgoldOA
>> 
>>> As to indexing, it is actually much easier to be done for repositories than for journals,
>>> because most repos expose standardized interfaces.
>> 
>> Then why is Paperity starting with Gold OA journal articles instead of Green OA journal
>> articles in repositories?
>> 
>>> So we don't need Google Scholar for this purpose, only as I said, we believe that the
>>> right order is journals first.
>> 
>> What you have said it that you believe the right order is Gold OA first, but you have
>> certainly not explained why — apart from the fact that Gold OA is certainly much
>> easier to access and aggregate:
>> 
>> Gold OA journal article blibliographic data can be harvested from the journals’
>> websites using DOAJ to identify all the journals.
>> 
>> But how are you going to find all the Green OA journal articles, if not with
>> Google Scholar? (WoS or SCOPUS can find you all journal articles, but
>> but won’t tell you which ones are Green OA.)
>> 
>> (BASE provides some of these data; ROAR 2.0 will soon provide it all.)
>> 
>> Best wishes,
>> Stevan
>> 
>>> 
>>> Best
>>> Marcin
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 10/12/2014 01:51 PM, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>>>> Harvesting Gold OA journal articles is a piece of cake. How will Paperity/redex harvest
>>>> Green OA articles published in non-OA journals but made OA somewhere on the
>>>> Web — via Google Scholar?
>>>> 
>>>> Sounds like a splendid idea if it can be done… But not if it is just Gold-biassed,
>>>> because most refereed research is not Gold, and the fastest growing form of
>>>> OA is Green (because of mandates, and absence of extra cost).
>>>> 
>>>> SH
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> Marcin Wojnarski, Founder of Paperity, www.paperity.org
>>> www.linkedin.com/in/marcinwojnarski
>>> www.facebook.com/Paperity
>>> www.twitter.com/Paperity
>>> 
>>> Paperity. Open science aggregated.
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> GOAL mailing list
>>> GOAL at eprints.org
>>> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> GOAL mailing list
>> GOAL at eprints.org
>> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
> 
> 
> -- 
> Marcin Wojnarski, Founder of Paperity, www.paperity.org
> www.linkedin.com/in/marcinwojnarski
> www.facebook.com/Paperity
> www.twitter.com/Paperity
> 
> Paperity. Open science aggregated.
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20141013/658f2d58/attachment-0001.html 