Dec 19 2007
An Academic View of knol
Siva Vaidhyanathan (who has a interesting if slightly paranoid-sounding blog) points to Peter Suber’s thoughts on knol’s impact on scholarly articles:
(1) Advantages of knols for peer-reviewed postprints: Full OA. CC licenses. Obvious visibility to search engines. Searchable full-text, not just metadata. Built-in community tools. Not PDF. Ad revenue option. Available to authors who don’t have a repository in their institution or discipline. (2) Drawbacks: May require porting the text and reformatting it with Google’s editing tools, not just a deposit. (How soon will someone write a flexible knols import-export tool?) Not built on free and open source software. Off-limits to journals permitting self-archiving only in the author’s institutional repository. Not affiliated with a research institution or research field. Long-term preservation efforts unclear. Stewardship by a for-profit corporation, not by academic librarians. (3) A wash: Not OAI-compliant, but does it need to be?
I, uh, don’t understand all of that, but I’m glad to hear that he’s encouraged.
