RE: Submission in repositories by people other than authors

[<Toby.GREEN@oecd.org>]

Atanu,

Ah! The challenge of avoiding link rot. One problem we find when 
we do post full text in multiple places is that we lose sight of 
the total number of downloads. We (and our funders) like to know 
the impact our publications have and measuring downloads is one 
way of gauging impact. Even if we can get reports on downloads 
etc (which Repec does well) it is often difficult to sum metrics 
from different platforms. Our preference, therefore, is to host 
our full text in one place and push the metadata around to 
maximize visibility. We are using DOIs as our linking system in 
an attempt to prevent link rot. There are other benefits to 
hosting full text ourselves - we can develop added-value 
services, such as onward links using the CrossRef system, which 
might not be possible from all platforms.

Toby

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Atanu Garai
Sent: 29 April, 2008 12:39 AM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Submission in repositories by people other than authors

Thomas Krichel wrote:

> Toby.GREEN@oecd.org writes
>
>> As you probably know, Repec is to economists what ArXiv is to 
>> physicists. Repec invites authors to post content, but it is 
>> also happy to have the institution do the posting on behalf of 
>> authors.
>
> RePEc is not a publisher, but a library, based on on 
> aggregation of over 800 publishers called RePEc archives. So 
> it's at a higher level than arXiv.

Toby, Thomas:

Thanks for these replies. However, we are working closely to the 
model that RePec is following except that we are keen to have the 
full text of the document in our database (for various reasons). 
One reason is that is you try to download/ open links URLs/ 
files, many of them are returning with problem loading page/ 550 
failed to change directory 
(http://ideas.repec.org/p/rjr/wpmems/071505.html) messages. This 
is quite normal when we have a distributed database and metadata 
is harvested and/or collected.

Atanu Garai
Globethics.net