Fatcat is versioned, publicly-editable catalog of research publications: journal articles, conference proceedings, pre-prints, blog posts, and so forth. The goal is to improve the state of preservation and access to these works by providing a manifest of full-text content versions and locations.
This service does not directly contain full-text content itself, but provides basic access for human and machine readers through links to copies in web archives, repositories, and the public web.
Significantly more context and background information can be found in The Guide.
Feedback and queries can be directed to webservices@archive.org.
A few things set Fatcat apart from similar indexing and discovery services:
This service aspires to be a piece of sustainable, long-term, non-profit, free-software, collaborative, open digital infrastructure. It is primarily designed to support the archival and dissemination roles of scholarly communication. It may also support the registration role (establishing precedence and authorship), but explicitly does not aid with certification of content, and is not intended to be used for evaluation of individuals, institutions, or venues. This service is "universal", not currated, and happily includes retracted and "predatory" content).
Fatcat is a project of the Internet Archive, a US-based non-profit digital library, well known for its Wayback Machine web archive and Open Library book digitization and lending service. All Fatcat databases and services run on Internet Archive servers in California, and a copy of most full-text content is stored in the Archive's collections and/or web archives.
Development of Fatcat and related web harvesting, indexing, and preservation efforts at the Archive have been partially funded (for the 2018-2019 period) by a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation ("Long-tail Open Access Journal Preservation"). Fatcat supports this work by both tracking which open access works in known archives and providing minimum-viable indexing and access mechanisms for long-tail works which otherwise would lack them.
The service would not technically be possible without hundreds of Free Software components and the efforts of their individual and organizational maintainers, more than can be listed here (please see the source code for full lists). A few major components include the PostgreSQL database, Elasticsearch search engine, Flask python web framework, Rust programming language, Diesel database library, Swagger/OpenAPI code generators, Kafka distributed log, Ansible configuration management tool, and Ubuntu GNU/Linux operating system distribution.
The front-page photo of a large feline with a cup of coffee is by Quinn Kampschroer, under a CC-0 license. The name "Fatcat" can be interpreted as short for "large catalog", as the service aspires to be a complete catalog of the digital scholarly record.
A list of technical contributors, including volunteers, is maintained in the
source code repository (CONTRIBUTORS.md). Thanks everybody!
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