coalibry.org 0.0.5 peer reviewed

Peer review is important aspect of the scholarly discourse. Honestly, right now, I'm too tied up in project work to do much peer review and the sparse time I have, should go into my editor-in-chief role. Already back to around new year, I intended to review coalibry.org but I just could not get around to it. I intended the review other websites even longer ago. But since peer review is not recognized and rewarded as an academic activity, it basically comes down to weekends. So, here goes.

First observations is a clean website with a basic search functionality. The subtitle is "Consolidated Open Access Library. Like many projects, and even more for open infrastructures, the investment comes before the, well, return-on-investment. The current database has almost 22 million entries, but the index is almost 600 days old. Open projects often run on free contributions. But that information cannot be found on the website: how people can contribute.

I am also not search what I can search on, so I do what many people do, search myself. This had the advantage that I can quickly assess what the website has to offer. However, given most of my research output is open access, I am disappointed to find only 5 items:

For each item I get some information, but not a lot. It would be nice if each item had a permalink. Information I do not get is the actual license. Being able to filter on this would be welcome too. Looking at the linked resources, the index seems focused on material on Figshare and Zenodo. That makes sense: there is a huge niche there to make that resource output findable. But there too, I have a lot more content. I am not actually sure this is the way to look for material for me, which seems more what people.coalibry.org is about, but that part does not seem to work yet.

Next steps?

So, what do I think the next steps should be.

1. ensure the website has a critical amount of unique feature (selling point, if you will)
2. update the index with some frequency (and make that automated)
3. make clear how people can contribute to the open project
4. make a page for each entry in the database and provide a permalink
5. provide at least the OA license for the entries
6. provide a Help function to explain people how they can search (e.g. search on license)
7. do something with people.coalibry.org and provide an ORCID URL pattern
8. link to the UnitedAcademics website
9. provide a statistics page for the 22 million documents (e.g. breakdown sources, types, license, etc)
10. add schemas.org annotation to pages for documents and people
11. link out to databases with more info about the articles (possibly extend your indices)