On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 11:59 AM, Alec Conroy alecmconroy@gmail.com wrote:
My point (working in an academic digital library and just seeing the amount of thesis, dissertation, articles passing by) is that if for people is a difficult, overcomplicated burden to upload a PDF in an institutional repository (5 minutes of their time, even less), how can we wikilibrarians think that they will come to us and upload and "curate" their text?
I suspect the current population of scientists will need us to step in and perform all the roles of a journal publisher, thus allowing them to continue their workflow completely without any change to their own scientific work. If we're going to capture science publishing, we have to be MORE accommodating than the for-profit journals.
... we don't currently do traditional publishing, of journals, encyclopedias, photos, or anything else. It's not something we've developed expertise in doing. While it may be a valuable service, that would almost be another top-level Project or two.
On the other hand, PLoS (plos.org - the public library of science) is a great journal publisher that reviews and publishes scientific work under a free license. [They impose even fewer restrictions on reuse than Wikimedia, using CC-BY, which is a more appropriate license in my opinion for novel and scientific work.]
So at one level, we should simply support PLoS and amplify their visibility and effectiveness.
At another, we could serve as a public repository of works submitted to them.
if a scientist's existing "upload" process is to just send it as an email attachment, or even god forbid to print it up and mail it to somebody, we need to be able to accommodate that with all the ease-of-use that their existing provider gives them.
True; we should be improving ease of use for everyone.
SJ