Want to try?

I admit I found it slightly dispiriting to look at the diagram here

http://www.mkbergman.com/?p=416

and realise that – with one or two notable exceptions – so little of our “repository” metadata is, currently at least, visible in that landscape.

I could answer at length, but maybe a comment’s not the best place for that. A big difference, I think, is that we’re actually able to move beyond the silo. Open Data, exposed using Open specifications like RDF, SPARQL, etc is visible and searchable across the web. Yes, the data has to sit somewhere (in a Talis Platform store, for example), but it’s available for combination with other resources elsewhere in the Platform or out on the open web. The data’s portable, too… so you can take your data out of the Platform and transfer it somewhere else if required.

The Talis Platform isn’t a straight comparison with a document repository like DSpace. Instead, it’s a set of services and capabilities that make it far easier for ourselves and third party developers to produce applications that will benefit from the ability to search, manage and navigate connections between disparate resources.

If you’re interested, we could set things up to let you load up data of your own, to see what it – and you – can do…

As far as Open Access goes, Peter Murray-Rust is a good start but you might also find the following (Open Access) papers useful background if you are interested.

Cheers, Duncan

Matthew Cockerill (2005) BMC bioinformatics comes of age. BMC Bioinformatics, 6

Gunter Eysenbach (2006) Citation advantage of open access articles. PLoS Biology, 4(5)

Peter Suber (2002) Open access to the scientific journal literature. Journal of Biology, 1(1)