Some things we noticed in the Scholar’s Biography exercise:
Issues of standardization
- content / hard to find IRs, fulltext
- format
- bibliographic description
Good model: LATTES (Brazil) – top down approach facilitates standards
Centralization helpful otherwise fractured, hard to search
Intellectual property
- not many authors know their rights
- copyright criminalizes author sharing
- does the university own the work, or the faculty? (in Canada, seems to be the latter)
One group had all niche scholars with small communities, did not seem interested in OA.
Another group had lots of scholars whose work would be of interest to the public, had been on t.v., but rarely found links to full-text audience. Brings up question: do scholars see public as audience?
Access depends on our networks – could access work of UBC scholar, not Lakehead or Africa
One group had a hard time finding authors with websites – e.g. history if they did have one, it was better organized, with a wider variety of materials than available in the IR (if there was one); most had full-text, but not using IR. Are IRs necessary, a good idea at all?
Another group – all had web presence, some university profile, others scholar managed. It seemed the more control the scholar had, the better the site was organized. Lots of PDFs on author websites. But is this stable? Will there be takedown notices?
One scholar publishes in OA journals, but nothing in the IR.
Annoying! broken links / spelling mistakes, even author’s names
entire book in google books – but not linked
What if everyone was on the same page?