Adventures in ePrintsland
2006-05-03
I've been working on a project that deals with Institutional repositories, but until last week I've never had anything of mine in one. This is cause for celebration, but it raises some questions.
Last week the AUSWEB '2006 conference committee accepted my paper on ICE, so I now have a pre-print in the USQ ePrints repository.
The process for me was simple. I emailed the PDF file to the local ePrints email address and an hour or so later it was in there. The benefit of this is that my paper was deposited by a professional cataloger – I would have put in messier metadata, not knowing how to refer to the conference, for example. The downside is that catalogers do not scale. The solution in the future will be a self-service system where I can have a go at submitting my article, and the cataloger will do quality control. The act of submitting should become a button on my desktop, next to the 'Blog this' button that says 'Deposit this'.
Now that I have my own paper in ePrints I've been doing a bit of exploring (not vanity searching, really, it's research).
Because the paper has been in USQ's ePrints for about a week I thought that should mean that my paper is available via Google Scholar – only it doesn't seem to be yet. The index must be out of date. Or is there something funny about my paper?
A search for “The Integrated Content Environment” in Google Scholar did not find my paper, but did turn up a paper at QUT's ePrints which references the project. But QUT ePrints told me:
404 File not Found Could not find the file /archive/00003693/01/3693_preprint.pdf
The specified file could not be found on this server.
If you reached this page by following a link within the repository, please contact the QUT | ePrints Archive administration. Otherwise, please check that you have typed the URL in correctly, or contact the person or site that supplied you with this URL.
Source: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00003693/01/3693_preprint.pdf
Next step was to go to the ePrints home page for QUT, and try searching with the title of the paper I'd found, The Rise of Open Access in the Creative, Educational and Science Commons. The resulting search found two entries with the same title, apparently identical, both claiming to be the latest version of this ePrint.
Neither my pre-print paper nor the QUT paper have a persistent identifier that points to a canonical version of the paper. What will happen to my pre-print? I don't know. When will Google drop the pre print of Scott Keil-Chisolm and Brian Fitzgerald's article? What will QUT do about this apparently duplicated record given that people may now have linked to both versions?