Moving scholarly communication into the 21st century

Digital libraries, Open Archives, Google Scholar: what next?
Tansley, Robert
2007-05-18T06:59:33Z
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Abstract
As a PhD student in Southampton in the 90s, struggling to get the results I needed for my thesis, I ran into a couple of problems that surprised me. Firstly, it was often difficult to get hold of an article cited by something I was reading. Secondly, I was starved of data to try out my algorithms and techniques on. Where was all the data that the authors of these articles I was reading used? Why, in both cases, could I not just click and get the article or the data I needed? And this in Computer Science, the very discipline supposedly fixing such problems! When I looked at other fields, for the most part the situation was just as bad or worse. It seemed that science was missing out on a great opportunity. From then on I dedicated my career to addressing this situation. Firstly, still at Southampton, I built the EPrints.org software for open access to scholarly articles; then, at HP Labs, I led the development of the DSpace software system, to enable access to and preservation of scholarly articles and also the underlying scientific data. Now, with Google, who have already contributed enormously with such tools as Google Scholar, I hope to help further the goal of moving scholarly communication into the 21st century. I'll talk about how scholarly communication has progressed over the last decade, and how various technologies have helped improve the situation; I'll also talk about some of the challenges that still remain, and where we can all go from here. Robert Tansley is an engineer at Google, Inc., working on ways to improve access to scholarly digital articles and data, with such technologies as Google Scholar. Previously he worked as a senior research scientist at HP Labs, where he was the architect and lead developer of DSpace, an open source system for storing, accessing and preserving research and education articles and data. He was part of the team that designed OAI-PMH. Previously he completed a PhD in multimedia information systems at the University Of Southampton, UK in 2000, where he also designed and implemented the Eprints.org repository software.