Re: OA Archives: Full-texts vs. metadata-only and other digital objects

From: Tim Gray <mtg32_at_CAM.AC.UK>
Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 06:59:01 -0400

Stevan

Thank you for your full and illuminating reply to my query about how much
material in OA archives is available as full text. I am surprised at how
low you estimate the figure to be and that it is not, yet, possible to
produce a definitive number.

I am wondering if the Open DOAR (Directory of Oopen Access Repositories -
the 'sister project' to the Directory of Open Access Journals, DOAJ) will
set strictly 'full text only' rules for inclusion in its directory? And how
will it relate to the archives.eprints directory you are involved with? It
gets confusing to me because there are so many lists of repositories around
on the web. How does the celestial harvesting list you mention relate to
the archives.eprints list (are they the same list?) or the large list kept
by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) at
<http://gita.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/>?

I take the archives.eprints to be the closest to a definitive list of the
OA Institutional Repositories which we are concerned with here - alhtough I
notice that our 'DSpace_at_Cambridge' repository
<http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/dspace/index.htm> is not included.

I see the distinction between OA Archives and the Open Access Initiative.
Maybe this is not strictly relevant to this forum and a basic
misunderstanding of the purposes of archiving, but I still cannot
understand why people are archiving *just* the metadata and not the full
text. It makes OA search engines like OAIster more like a any other
standard bibliographic database with mostly subscription-only access.

I am interested in the whole area of Open Access and keeping up with
developments. This forum is excellent for that purpose.

Thank you.
Received on Mon Jun 13 2005 - 11:59:01 BST

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