Pete said to me yesterday...that he feels very reluctant these days to put content into any service that doesn't spit it back out at you as an RSS or Atom feed.
I completely concur....
But what does this mean for repositories?
Imagine a world in which we talked about 'research blogs' or 'research feeds' rather than 'repositories', in which the 'open access' policy rhetoric used phrases like 'resource outputs should be made freely available on the Web' rather than 'research outputs should be deposited into institutional or other repositories', and in which accepted 'good practice' for researchers was simply to make research output freely available on the Web with an associated RSS or Atom feed.
Wouldn't that be a more intuitive and productive scholarly communication environment than what we have currently? ...
Since [arXiv], we have largely attempted to position repositories as institutional services, for institutional reasons, in the belief that metadata harvesting will allow us to aggregate stuff back together in meaningful ways.
Is it working? I'm not convinced. Yes, we can acknowledge our failure to put services in place that people find intuitively compelling to use by trying to force their use thru institutional or national mandates? But wouldn't it be nicer to build services that people actually came to willingly?
In short, do we need a repositories plan B?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/16/2007 12:59:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.