List of frequently asked questions
1. Why don't I find my own publications using PhysDoc?
The system does not know the link, so let your publication-list or publication
tank be registered.
2. Why does PhysDoc offer three different entry points for searching:
CARMEN, OAD and QuickSearch?
PhysDoc CARMEN searches for scientific documents at Physics Institutions
webservers, institutional repositories and personal homepages worldwide
in as far as they are known to the system. Their bibliographic content
either gets extracted from standardized metadata (machine readable data about the document) or is "guessed" by the system. It's a huge distributed repository
but may include misinterpreted documents.
PhysDoc-OAD retrieves worldwide those scientific
documents at institutional repositories and on departmental and personal homepages
worldwide where the bibliographic content has been marked by the
author or his professional institution
using the international standard for such metadata.
Physdoc QuickSearch
searches for scientific documents at all Physics Institutions webservers worldwide
using a simplified form of the PhysDoc CARMEN search without any
ranking or interpretation of the results.
3. How easy is it to add metadata to my documents?
4. What is Open Access?
Open Access means: make the document freely accesible on the web first.
More formally an Open Access publication is one that meets two conditions:
This definition is a simplified and slightly modified version of a definition which can be found in the IFLA Statement on Open Access.
5. How can I assure that my document is Open-Access?
Put it either on your own webserver (individual selfarchiving), on the one of your
institution (institutional selfarchiving), on a central document server, or send it to
one of the open access journals.
6. What advantage do I have from providing my scientific documents as Open Access?
You will be (on the average) 3-8 times more cited than using the toll access road only, and vastly more read.
See studies by Lawrence and a recent project by
Harnad et al..
7. Do publishers allow me to self-archive my publications?
Most publishers (about 85% by now) will allow self-archiving on either your own or
an institutional website in either preprint, postprint or
both. "Preprint" in this sense means the article as submitted to the
publisher while "postprint" refers to the article after the process of
peer-reviewing.
8. What is the use of Open Access if no one plans to provide documents?
An inreasing number of universities, scientific institutes and private
persons use open access for
first publication of all their research work created. See a growth underestimate of
the present growth of
number of open access articles in
institutional archives alone. Additionally more and more Scientific and governmental
organizations (for example the German Science Foundation) require open access first publication of all research work
created using public funding (see What do the Funding agencies say to Open Access?).
9. What do the Funding agencies say to Open Access?
Alot of funding agencies will make Open Access a prerequisite for public funding.
Disclaimer:
The authors of this website do not take any liability for the content of any other websites referred to
on this page, in particular where copyright regulations are concerned. This page may be outdated within a short time, though we try to keep it up to date.
and (better, but more work)
add machine-readable information (metadata) on the bibliographic data (title, authors name, format, etc.)
to the document, with the result, that most search engines in the world
(including PhysNet) will retrieve it form now on. [see: 3) How easy is it to add
metadata to my documents?].
In addition, it allows searching for several highly structured mathematical documents.
It additionally searches in central archives such as ArXiv, large institutional libraries, and
in some publishers journals [totalling to about 630.000 documents].
There are several alternative ways for you:
In addition, providing your publications as pre-prints accelerates the
publication process and will on average result in faster response to your publication from the
community which is potentially leading to fast error corrections or an enhanced
experimental setup for follow-up experiments.
If you provide your pre-print through an institutional repository you ensure
fastest possible publication while establishing an early priority date ensuring
that no other person can claim merit or register patents for your discoveries.
A list of Publisher copyright
policies & self-archiving regulations is provided by the SHERPA projekt.
In addition there is a searchable list
of selected physics journals and their conditions for self-archiving.
With more publications being available freely (at the moment about twenty
percent of all publications from the last ten years are provided online as
Open-Access publications) one should expect more
and more scientists to search in OAI compliant resources. By making
your publications available as Open-Access publications you can
contribute to the world knowledge being available unbiased to everyone.
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