[UPS] Interoperability via Z39.50 searching using Decomate

[Stevan Harnad]

On Mon, 22 Nov 1999, Paschoud,J wrote:

> Dear Stevan Harnad,
> 
> I have been following your developing proposals for CogPrints Archives with
> interest (I see them via lis-elib@mailbase.ac.uk).  I've also referenced
> them (as a "significant potential economic pressure on the academic
> publishing industry"  - I hope you don't mind) in a forthcoming paper for
> the Online Information Conference this December.

Dear John,

That's fine, but the "pressure" will only come AFTER authors actually
start self-acrhiving in significant numbers. What we need is (positive)
pressure on the authors, to self-archive. The hope is that interoperable
Open Archives, if widely adopted by Universities, with easy
self-archiving and hand-holding or even proxies for neophytes and
technophobes, will provide the incentive we all hope for, and critical
mass will at least be reached.

> I am particularly keen to persuade LSE academics (individually, and
> collectively via our various associated research institutions) to make
> available the many items of 'grey literature' which are produced each year,
> in a consistent and searchable form;  this is a defined objective of the EU
> Decomate2 Project, for which I am responsible at LSE.

Grey is, fine, but open archiving is for everyything from black
(unrefereed preprints) to white (refereed reprints). No particular focus
on grey. And of course the white literature, which is currently hostage
to tolls, is what we are trying to free...

> We would certainly like to 'institutionalise' this practise, using resources
> of the library, but we're concerned that they would be able to inter-operate
> via Z39.50 searching, using the Decomate service that we are developing,
> allowing a single search across a variety of sources, of copyright
> (publisher-supplied) and non-copyright material.

I will leave that question to be abswered by the Open Archives experts.
The Santa Fe efforts are to make all open archives interoperable; the
interoperability with them of the closed (proprietary, financially
fire-walled) commercial archives is in the hands of the closed archives.

Note that papers self-archived by authors in Open Archives are
copyrighted too. Copyright protects authorship, i.e., intellectually
property. But the authors are giving it away here. In other words,
it is not only the black and grey literature that is give-away: The
white refereed-journal literature all is too...

> I assume (mainly because Thomas Krichel has been representing RePEc in your
> meetings so far  - and Decomate2 is already accessing the RePEc Archive),
> that this *should* be technically easier than some of the commercial sources
> we've had to deal with so far.

I cannot answer, but I hope those who are more technically savvy than me
will do so, probably Herb vonden Sompel.

> I would appreciate any advice you can give me on:
> (a) Technical issues of connectivity to bibliographic data and full-text, as
> it's likely to exist in proposed CogPrints Archives;  

The bibliographic data and full-text will all be in both CogPrints and
its generic, pandisciplinary counterpart, Eprints. It will have its own
search mechanism, but commercial databases can index it too, if they
like. With everything suitably metadata tagged for interoperability, you
could search it with Alta Vista if you liked, and if you restrict to
metatag "refereed journals," it will be as if Alta Vista ranged over all
and only the journal literature, distcributed in author home archives
all over the planet.

> (b) Ways of persuading our academics and research institutes to 'join in'
> with this.

Here's a way: Don't focus particularly on the "grey" literature and
commercial search services and focus instead on mounting the
interoperable Open Archives at LSE and providing incentives for all LSE
authors to self-archive all their papers in them: black, white amd
grey...

> I will do my best to ensure that your initiative has our full support as a
> library.

You'll need collaboration from the Provost (or equivalent) too, as well
as the Library.

Best wishes,

Stevan

> 
> John Paschoud
> --
> Project Manager, HeadLine (http://www.headline.ac.uk);
> UK Project Manager, Decomate-2 (http://www.bib.uab.es/decomate2);
> Information Systems Engineer
> British Library of Political & Economic Science
> at the London School of Economics
> 25 Southampton Buildings, London  WC2A 1PH
> +44 (0)171 955 6129
> PGP Fingerprint: EF16 8ECF 2BC9 1A66 CB7C  B9A5 775F 5982 9A8C C1EB
>