I’ve been interested for a while in the amount of scientific\/academic knowledge that gets lost to the world due to conference proceedings not being open access \/ disappearing off the face of the internet. My main question at the moment is, just how much is lost and how much is still available?<\/p>\n
Unfortunately googling 1,955 conferences will rapidly give me RSI, so I’m hoping I can convince you to do a few for me<\/a> – in the interests of science!<\/p>\n Background:<\/strong> I’ve written elsewhere about Open Access to conference literature<\/a> (short version: conferences are where a huge amount of research gets its first public airing, yet conference papers are notoriously hard to track down after the fact) and Open Access and the PBRF<\/a> (short version: if conference papers were all OA, PBRF verification\/auditing would become a lot easier). Here I’m wanting to quantify the situation.<\/p>\n The data:<\/strong> The original dataset was sourced from TEC, from the list of conference-related NROs (nominated research outputs) from the 2012 PBRF<\/a> round. There are obvious and non-obvious limitations but basically I feel this makes it a fairly good listing of conferences between 2006-2011 that New Zealand academics presented at and felt that presentation was worthy of being included among their best work for the period. The original dataset is confidential, but I’ve received permission to post a derived, anonymised dataset publically for collaborative purposes, and in due course publish it on figshare.<\/p>\n How you can help:<\/strong>
\n(Note: by contributing to the spreadsheet you’re agreeing to licence your contribution under a Creative Commons Zero licence, meaning anyone can later reuse it in any way with or without attribution. (Though I’ll be attributing it in the first instance – see below.))<\/p>\n