[OAI-eprints] Re: [BOAI] Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives

[Radu]

Quoting Christopher Gutteridge <cjg@ecs.soton.ac.uk>:

> What I'm asking is; has anyone given consideration to ways
> of smoothing over this duplication of effort? Possibly some
> negotiated automated process for insitutional archives
> uploading to the subject archive, or at least
> assisting the author in the process.

If peer-to-peer 'open' music sharing software like Napster and the 
like managed to get set up so quickly and be so successful, I wonder 
what the problem is within the academic circles.

Is it the inertia of 'researching the best standard'? Why don't we 
simply adopt one of the successful models already at work in 
the 'fringe industry'?

Why do we have to develop yet another standard?
- Is it for the sake of credit? Think about it. Are citations a good 
measure of credit? When you cite an article that simply describes 
someone else's work, who gets the credit? How far can one follow back 
the syntopical chain of citations? Just because a paper is cited a 
lot does it mean it's influential or plain wrong and lots of people 
jumped in the water to retrieve the stick?
- Because of reliability? That would be solved by someone investing 
in some servers that will be always up and which will selectively 
duplicate the works which get good 'marks' from their users.

Make the system 'credit-based', allow the researchers to just place 
the work they want to make public on dedicated machines within their 
Universities and other research venues.

 And please:
- stop creating all-new standards. Before you start standardization, 
look around and see if the same functionality is not already 
available.
- stop fragmenting the digital world into exclusivist 'servers' 
and 'services'. Are we striving for open or closed access?
- stop looking for the 'final ontology' for classifying stuff. The 
world is not perfect. People are not perfect. And good 
indexing/search facilities are more efficient than any ontology.

I could dig up references for most of my assertions, but I bet most 
of you are already aware of them.

We just need access to each-other's work, so that our ideas grow in 
the fertile land of other minds.

Cheers,
Radu
(www.monicsoft.net)