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Subscribe                 38 Ideas, 114 Comments, 646 Votes »

Lets think outside the box.... 

Posted by ian.stuart 08/15/2008 07:00 AM GMT+00:00

This is focused on the researcher world, but the arguments hold for other fields

Q: What is the primary factor for ranking researchers?
A: Citations.
Surely the aim, therefor, of the researcher is to market her work as widely as possible, to maximise the potential for citation.
Given that we are now in the Information Age, where The Internet is the primary source of answers (backed up by reading what has been found, on paper), then the sensible solution is to place enough of the research results on the Internet such that they can be found and assesed, and followed up.
Where, in the Internet, this material is placed is almost moot: the Internet has no location per sae - Search Engine index everything, everywhere.

Q: What is the primary factor for ranking Institutions?
A: The amount of research performed by researchers of standing (see above)
Surely the aim, therefor, of the Institution is to market the work of their researchers, with sufficient "corporate identity" attached, as widely as possible, to maximise the readership of that work.

THEREFORE
I think we can say that researchers need publicity, and Institutions want to be the ones to do it.

The question I see is:
"How can we make it easist for the researcher to publicise their work, and how can we help the Institution capitalise on that individual publicity?"

"Institutional Repositories" are the current solution - are they the right one?

Repositories are dead, long live repositories 

Posted by ian.stuart 06/27/2008 07:00 AM GMT+00:00

The current repository technology is library/cataloger centric: items are uploaded (usually by a cataloger, not the author), and most of the meta-data is added by a subject specialist. In this model, the author-as-depositor is (at best) just an initiator for a deposit process.

A better solution would be to move towards a Combined Research Information System [CRIS], where the academic can organise their areas of interest [AOI]; see the research grants they have (and associate them with their AOI); lodge keep-safe copies of work-in-progress, data-sets, talks, ideas for future work, posters, etc (and associate them with grants or AOIs).

From this corpus of data, the academic can indicate what is visible locally (within the research group/department/organisation) and what is available globablly... and from that "globally available" pool, an "Institutional Repository" can be assembled.

The big advantages of a system like this is that the user only needs to define the meta-data specific to that object (an AOI has a title and a description, and inherits a creator from the CRIS; an article has a title and an abstract, but also inherits data from the associated grant and/or AOIs) - this is a much smaller "keystroke" barrier (or whatever you call that "I don't want to enter lots of metadata" problem)

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