Speaker
Description
In the age of information, access to the basic metadata and indexing of scholarly publications is still limited and not “open”. The number of scholarly articles accessible online worldwide is estimated between 200 and 300 million. The combined metadata associated with all these articles require less than 1 Terabyte to store, which is the capacity of a single modern Hard Drive. This amount of data could be queried, in real-time, using a single modern computationally equipped server, available at many research institutions. While the information technologies to store and process such data is conveniently available, the community of scholars still lack “open access” to such data. In this study, we will first investigate this problem by exploring various avenues of access to scholarly publications and the role of “big players” in the publishing and indexing industry. We will then review successful efforts to overcome this issue and will provide possible directions to facilitate universal open access to the metadata of scholarly publications worldwide.
