I wanted to write a bit more about this idea of a negative click repository....First some ancient history....
When I joined the University of Glasgow in 2000, the Archives and Business Records Centre with other collaborators within the University were near the end of a short project on Effective Records Management (ERM). During the course of that project, they surveyed committee clerks (who create many authoritative institutional records) on how much effort they were willing to put in, how many clicks they were willing to invest, to create records that would be easily maintainable in the digital era. The answer was: zero, none, nada! Rather than give up at this point, the team went on to create CDocS, an instrumented addition to MS Word that allowed the committee clerks to create their documents in university standard forms, with agreed metadata, with the documents and metadata automatically converted into XML for preservation and to HTML for display and sharing. ICE (see below) might be a contemporary system of a related kind, in a slightly different area.
In April 2007, Peter Murray Rust had an epiphany thinking about repositories on the road to Colorado, realising that SourceForge was a shared repository that he had been using for years, and speculating that it might be used for writing an article....
Finally, I posted earlier on Nico Adam's comments on repositories for scientists....
[W]e need to develop repositories that make the data work to take human work away: negative click repositories. Maybe as Nico was suggesting, what we need is an array of tools, connected together by technologies like Atom/RSS and/or OAI-ORE that can be configured so as to link the components into an information management system that works to reduce the publishing effort on campus, and captures the intellectual product on the way....
Update. Also see Chris R's own follow-up post (June 18, 2008), and a response by Laura Smart (June 20, 2008).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/11/2008 06:01:00 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.
