Great point. - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

I live the idea of decentralized repositories, but only if there's a widely-used standard way of attaching data to the papers (via rel attributes or whatever) so that they can be searched for. I'm waiting to see what they do here. - Mr. Gunn

I too wonder of the value of this. However, if they provide programmatic access to get the data out, then I dont care where it was origionally "depsosited" - Frank

That's exactly what I'm talking about. - Mr. Gunn

@Frank, I'd be surprised if they did. Most of their "tools" require a registration and login to use them. It seems redundant to me. Why choose researchgate when submission to PMC is automatic, or you could use a much better established service like arXiv - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

I thought a preprint server was for material that may or may not be published, but a self-archive was specifically for versions of a published article. Am I wrong about this? - Ian Mulvany

Nope, your definition is right. Researchgate's plan is to get one or the other. If the publisher doesn't allow self-archiving, then they want the pre-print. I'm not sure how legal self archiving on another company's site and in their database is though. Seems to go against the spirit of the idea of self archiving - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

arXiv is a different animal than PMC, so yes, Ian, you're right. Technically, Brian, they're saying they are just acting as the blog host in this case, which I'll buy. I don't own the server my blog is hosted on. - Mr. Gunn

@MrGunn, I guess, but that's running in the gray area. I'm sure publishers will see it more black and white than that. - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

ResearchGATE currently has a non-trivial number of members (140,000), according to an email message that arrived in my inbox today. A copy of the message is at: http://tillje.wordpress.com/2009... - Jim Till

yeah, Jim, seems like everyone got that email. They also say they're the first to make an directory of self-archived manuscripts and so on. Some think the numbers to not be what they say: http://www.nextgenerationscience.com/science... - Mr. Gunn

Personally, Brian, I care about how the publishers want to see it about as much as BoraZ cares what their business model is going to be (http://scienceblogs.com/clock...). I care much more about my rights as an author. - Mr. Gunn

@Mr. Gunn, my own limited experience with the social networking aspects of ResearchGATE is that the groups I've joined (Science & Publication 2.0, Science Communication, Research in Canada, Feedback) don't compare very favorably with Twitter plus FriendFeed. For a more positive review, see: http://openparachute.wordpress.com/2009... - Jim Till

@MrGunn, I know ;) Just sayin... @Jill, stating the 140k number is very disingenuous. You can have 3 million members, but if they do nothing, then the community isn't very useful. Researchgate's most active area is the methods forum and there's maybe 5 posts a week in there. What are the other 139,995 people doing there?? - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

"I care much more about my rights as an author" - keep going, @MrGunn, I like the idea of strengthening publishing cultures where authors keep their copyright in the first place. Generally speaking, as long as an open repository (OR) is fully oai-compliant and everyone can see which of the files claim to have passed peer review, all's fine with me (who has lately started to run an OR together with an OA journal). Since no one knows how long e.g. PubMed will be around, and since self-organization in research has been very productive, decentralized oai-compliant repositories are just great. And if ResearchGATE users learn about OA green this way, fine with me. - Claudia Koltzenburg

Yes, Claudia, that's my take as well. Providing a repository is great, let's have more of that, but make sure it's open and can be part of a web of other open repositories. - Mr. Gunn

It'll be interesting to see how access to the DB will be handled. Currently you have to be registered to do anything there. The hardest part of getting something like this to work will be compliance. It'd be great if people uploaded and provided their own metadata to a repository like this. But I can see populating this DB with metadata being tedious. - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

does e.g. Mendeley provide an oai-compliant OR yet? - Claudia Koltzenburg

@Brian. To address the 'tedious-ness' issue: could not metadata for individual (or sets of) papers be harvested from CrossRef on the fly? They offer an OAI-PMH service: http://www.crossref.org/help... (note: I've only recently started looking at OAI, so dunno if this is a silly proposition). - 'Mummi' Thorisson

@Brian, so far, I've uploaded the full text (PDF) of only one publication into the ResearchGATE repository. There was no requirement to provide metadata. See: https://www.researchgate.net/publica... - Jim Till

Just added a 2nd full text (another PDF). I've also added a couple of comments about this publication. Haven't tested whether or not the comments can include html tags (can't preview or edit comments): https://www.researchgate.net/publica... - Jim Till

That's pretty nice. It automatically found the metadata for the article? Or did you have to plug in the title somewhere when you uploaded? - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

@Brian, the title of the 2nd publication was obtained (by ResearchGATE) from arXiv. However, the arXiv version of the full text is in html, so I uploaded the PDF (the version in Learned Publishing). BTW, I've just tried adding links to a Comment in ResearchGATE, and they work (with no added html tags required). See: https://www.researchgate.net/publica... - Jim Till

Claudia, I know Mendeley is currently looking into OAI compliance and it would probably be easy to implement. In fact, they're at the point where they want more input from librarians about this sort of thing, so now would be an ideal time to bring this up. I'll see if I can get a more substantial answer for you. - Mr. Gunn

Claudia: To answer your question, we're not OAI-compliant yet, but we're looking into releasing APIs to our database soon. Also, as I mentioned during a conversation with Peter Suber back in March (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters...), we've been encouraging our users to self-archive on their Mendeley profiles as well. So if ResearchGate is "the first application of its kind worldwide" that allows this, as they say, then we and arXiv and RePEc and SSRN and pretty much every insitutional repository were "firster" :-) - Victor / Mendeley Team

@Victor, when they launched they were also the first social network for the sciences (ignoring the fact that Nature Network had been up for a year already). - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

Sounds great! Doing as good and thorough a job as PMC would be a challenge, but it's worth trying and the more decent options researchers have the better. - Mike Chelen

@LibRat - good point, thx - Claudia Koltzenburg

@Victor / Mendeley Team, thank for sticking your head out here, in my view of the matter, an automatic check with RomeoSherpa would certainly be a must for any oai open repository (OR) projects for Mendeley, too :-) - Claudia Koltzenburg

Any concerns about archiving a thread like this one via WebCite and then linking to it in a blog post? - Jim Till

Neil: I agree, total registered users isn't the best metric - would be more helpful to measure active users, or average time spent on the site. - Mike Chelen

Jim, you may have already done this, but this item does have a permalink: http://friendfeed.com/the-lif.... Surely it's better to link directly to the item than via a secondary site (also a problem with shortened URLs)? - Mr. Gunn

@mike, they'd never ever do that. There's a reason they throw around that bloated number. - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

@Mr. Gunn, how permanent is the FF permalink URL? I`ve been assuming that both the long URL (http://friendfeed.com/the-lif...) and the short one (http://ff.im/89VkB) will rot. Hope that I'm wrong. - Jim Till

Jim: as far as web pages go, these are pretty reliable. the URL would stop working if the group name were changed, in which case the ff.im link would still work, unless the topic were deleted. it's also good practice to save a mirror with a bookmarking site such as http://diigo.com or http://sharecopy.com - Mike Chelen

I've linked to this thread in a comment on my blog: http://tillje.wordpress.com/2009... - Jim Till

This thread has also been bookmarked on Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/article... - Jim Till

Getting back to the start of this discussion, why should I be interested in archiving in a repository if there is PubMedCentral? Shouldn't I rather be interested to get more stuff into PubMedCentral, e.g. by starting PubMedCentral UK (already in the works) or PubMedCentral Germany? Both Archiving and searching in a central database is much easier. - Martin Fenner

We shouldn't forget that PMC has a limited remit. If you are outside that remit (e.g. publishing plant work, or any non-biomedical field) then your papers are not welcome in PMC. Perhaps ResearchGate has a role for these fields. - Frank Norman

@Claudia Re. how long will PMC be around, I think it has a better chance of longevity than the majority of online services. It is part of the Natl Lib Med, which is part of NIH. PMC is also mirrored in UK at the Brit Lib and (soon) will be mirrored elsewhere. It would take a lot for all these to fail. - Frank Norman

@Frank, yes, well, this was a rather implicit footnote of mine pointing to a prevailing cultural habit that seems to say something like: the biggest must surely be those who last longest... hence deserve most trust by scientists, too. hm... @Martin, any decentrality - centrality debate is of course highly important in Computer Science (and LIS) fields. My take on this is that what seems to be the most practicable way today may not be the most useful in the long run. And: why not let us stay open minded about this? - Claudia Koltzenburg