[Foundation-l] Black market science

[Birgitte_sb at yahoo.com]

On Jul 9, 2011, at 4:06 PM, Andrea Zanni <zanni.andrea84 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2011/7/9 <Birgitte_sb at yahoo.com>
> 
>> Snip 
> 
>> Having a corpus with some depth on Wikisource will open up a much different
>> reading experience than an index of PDFs, even though the words all match.
>> Just look at what is being done with the SCOTUS documents,  Wikis simply
>> offer a richer study environment for documents that are properly linked
>> together than other sorts of digital libraries. For all that born digital
>> documents emphasize the "digital" they often treat the text as if printed on
>> a page by regularly using hypertext only in footnoted references. It is
>> worth putting such things on Wikisource, if you can anticipate being able to
>> get a decent sized corpus of scholarship of some field under a free license.
>> And that will vary by field and maybe even sub-specialty.
>> 
> 
> Yes, it is definiw ittely worth it to put all these text on Wikisource.
> I uploaded my thesis years ago, also with the explicit aim to test the
> potential hypertextual features of Wikisource (in it.source we have proper
> template for Work and Author citations, and I find them the real added value
> of our digital library).
> 
> 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
> clearly remeber the "Screw it" feeling I had the day after I graduated,
> meaning that I would not even touch my thesis again for the next months (and
> so it was).
> 
> I'm not offering solutions here, but if we want to work in the direction of
> Open Access and of reaching a massive audience out there, maybe we should
> think out of the (current) box.
> 
> 

I wouldn't really expect authors adding their thesis to Wikisource piecemeal, at least unitil there is some critical mass reached in their area of scholarship.  It would be probably started by someone more interested in creating well-linked coverage of a topic. Definitely it needs someone with a strong interest in curating schorship of Foo in big-picture way. 

BirgitteSB