I have looked at Scientific Commons before, but to be honest, I had completely forgot about it. The only thing I noticed when looking at how Scientific Commons works is that they do not index non-Open Access publications. And I understand the reasons they chose that, especially since they are locally caching the articles on their servers.

However, what I feel would be a wonderful addition is to make use of all the Institutional Repositories out there with preprints available for download but the commercial publisher retains full copyright protections on the published material. Creating an interface, similar to Scientific Commons but more robust, allowing the linking of those two versions in one place could be a powerful tool.

The net effect is that if there is an Institutional Repository version of an article in a closed journal, then the knowledge contained is still available for anyone interested.

Granted, the user-base of something like this isn’t necessarily huge because the vast majority of users of scholarly works don’t pay anything for access (the out of sight out of mind thought for those academics in Universities). I see the user base as being those who want unified access to scholarly work, in general, not just Open Access and not just Commercial.

Larry

I’m curious, what sorts of things do you see a music community doing with a Launchpad-like service? Would it be simply hosting of the music files by individuals/groups (users and “teams” on LP)?

The main idea I was trying to harp on was how well LP communicates with upstream bug trackers (it can always be improved, but it is doing it better than any other system I know of). Because of that ability we can do work across many different open source projects efficiently and make sure that the fixes are disseminated quickly. In the Scholarly Communication/Publishing world I equated “upstream” with different archives of the work: Institutional Repositories, Open Access Journals, Commercial Journals, or I guess even authors’ websites, which I forgot before.

Other than the linking to upstream bug trackers (and PPAs) there isn’t a whole lot that is different about Launchpad.* But it is that ability to link things which are the same or very similar in one spot which would “revolutionize” the scholarly communication arena, in my opinion.

* The build system is great, the answer tracker is a neat idea, the translations are awesome; I’m just focusing on a specific part of LP for my idea. I guess the others could be a part of the Scholar’s LaunchPad (like translations) but I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be used as much.

Oh, and I’m still not certain that open sourcing LP is the only option here. The backend stuff is very very specific to the job is does now (code hosting, building code, others things with code) and probably not very “map-able” to other types of content. The interface is what I was mainly using as my example. The interface and the ability to link to other places intelligently

Thanks for your comments!

I’m really interested in getting people’s responses to this idea. I may not have expressed my ideas as well as I could (I was in class at the time) so I would love for people to ask questions, Challenge my idea. Nit pick it. Compliment it if you have to. But, please, challenge my idea, not some perpendicular topic.