Summary: Designing for the Discipline: Open
Libraries and Scholarly Communication,
Krichel’s talk
offers insight into the broader workings of scholarly communications and
scholarly communities as well as specific details of the RePEc system.
He touches on where libraries may go wrong in how they approach scholarly
communications and how they could do better if they want to play a role.
Krichel believes
that there is now, and historically has been for a long time, an abundance of
communities where scholars talk to scholars in their own disciplines.
Scholars are not primarily speaking to students and to others outside
their disciplines. Additionally, the
methods of communication and the extent of communication within a discipline
vary from field to field. As Krichel points out, “informal publishing
doesn’t work for all disciplines.” Nonetheless, he says, ”the internet
affords scholars in different disciplines opportunities to communicate in less
expensive, innovative ways. A successful scholarly communication initiative
usually comes from within . . . [a]
discipline; it’s tailored for the people in that discipline. Often it is not
particularly well known outside that particular discipline.”
Historically, and
before the internet, scholarly communities have collected and disseminated
preprints and working papers. “The preprint communities were basically all for
circulating their preprints among their peers,” says Krichel. “The working
paper communities [were] where the working papers were essentially issued by
departments, and a more departmental level publishing took place.”
Krichel argues that
where libraries err is that they are “concentrating on the wrong things.
Libraries concentrate on access to the whole system. They concentrate on the
readers and they concentrate on the documents.”
Libraries would do better, he argues, if they focus on the needs of the
writers rather than the readers.
Krichel gives
details about how RePEc works. The
system draws data from 460+ archives (or sites where full text resides) world
wide. Volunteers maintain the
structure and a number of search interfaces.
Scholars contribute metadata about their digital objects (articles) to RePEc
and RePEc then links to the articles. RePEc relies heavily on authors keeping
their own information up to date so that their materials can be found.
In order to assure that their articles have impact, or are downloaded,
scholars feel an incentive to keep their material findable and their personal
information up-to-date.
A major concern of
writers, as Krichel sees it, is that their writing have impact. RePEc is a
system that, to some degree, can measure impact. Because
it tracks and reports downloads of content, writers are eager to contribute.
Scholars can offer statistics on download frequency as signs of the impact of
their writing.
The discussion of
impact raised the concern that measuring downloads is not the same as measuring
citations. Evidence of citation is often equated with impact. One might question
whether either downloading or citation are measures of impact or quality in an
article. Krichel thinks there are
several ways we can measure quality. As
he purports, “we can measure quality of downloads, we can measure quality of
citations. We can measure quality of an author and number of papers written;
there [are] various ways in which we could do it. Correlating these various ways
is not that trivial because of the problems still with the underlying data; the
data is not perfect.” In answer to his own question, “do downloads act as a
forecast for citations?”, Krichel suggests that it is still too hard to tell
but that a system may be built at some point that will help in this
determination. Regardless, downloads
do indicate a step in the research process and should not be discounted.
A question raised
indicates that some may try to cheat the system.
Robot downloaders could raise the statistics for any article.
Krichel suggests that there are safeguards to help prevent this.
Is RePEc acting in
the role of the librarian gathering resources and offering access? Krichel
agrees and comments that involving librarians in the process is “not a bad
idea.” He goes on to say that
“if librarians would be taking over the dissemination role of scholars and
basically ---- output and organize it in a more efficient way than scholars can
do, then they would be doing a great service.”