{% extends "base.html" %} {% block body %} <h1>About Fatcat</h1> <p>Fatcat is versioned, public-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. <p>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, institutional and other repositories, and the public web. <p>Significantly more context and background information can be found in <a href="https://guide.{{ config.FATCAT_DOMAIN }}/">The Guide</a>. <p>Feedback and queries can be directed to the <b><a href="mailto:info@archive.org">info@archive.org</a></b> email address. <h3>Goals and Features</h3> <p>A few things set fatcat apart from similar indexing and discovery services: <ul> <li>inclusion of archival file-level metadata (content digests) in addition to URLs, which allows automated verification ("do I have the right copy"), reveals content-drift over time, and enables efficient distribution of content through the ecosystem <li>native support for "post-PDF" digital media, including archival web captures and datasets, as well as content stored on the distributed web <li>data model that captures the work/edition (aka, "release") distinction, grouping pre-print, post-review, published, re-published, and updated versions of a work together <li>public editing interface, allowing metadata corrections and improvements from individuals and bots in addition to automated imports from authoritative sources <li>focus on providing a stable API and corpus (making integration with diverse user-facing applications simple), while enabling full replication and mirroring of the corpus to reduce the risks of centralized control </ul> <p>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 <i>archival</i> and <i>dissemination</i> (in terms of access) roles of scholarly communication. It may also support the <i>registration</i> role (establishing precedence and authorship), but explicitly does not aid with <i>certification</i> of content (particularly curation; this service is "universal" and happily includes retracted and "predatory" content), and is not intended to be used for <i>evaluation</i> of individuals, institutions, or venues. <h3>Sources of Metadata</h3> The source of all bibliographic information is recorded in edit history metadata, which allows the progeny of all fields to be reconstructed. A few major sources are worth highlighting here: <ul> <li>Release metadata from <b>Crossref</b> (a major non-profit DOI registrar), via their public <a href="https://github.com/CrossRef/rest-api-doc">REST API</a> <li>Release metadata and linked fulltext content from NIH <b>Pubmed</b> (a US national repository) and <b><a href="https://arxiv.org">arXiv.org</a></b> (a large pre-print repository hosted at Cornell University) <li>Release metadata and linked public domain fulltext content the <b>JSTOR</b> Early Journal Content collection <li>Creator (author) names and de-duplication from <b>ORCID</b> (an author identifier service), via their annual public data releases <li>Journal title metadata from <b>DOAJ</b>, <b>ISSN ROAD</b>, and <b>SHERPA/RoMEO</b> <li>Full-text URL lists from <b><a href="https://core.ac.uk">CORE</a></b>, <b><a href="http://unpaywall.org">Unpaywall</a></b>, <b><a href="https://www.semanticscholar.org">Semantic Scholar</a></b>, <b><a href="https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu">CiteseerX</a></b>, and <b><a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/academic">Microsoft Academic Graph</a></b>. <li>The <a href="https://guide.{{ config.FATCAT_DOMAIN }}/sources.html">guide</a> lists more major sources </ul> Many thanks for the hard work of all these projects, institutions, and individuals! <h3>Support and Acknowledgments</h3> <p>Fatcat is a project of the <b><a href="https://archive.org">Internet Archive</a></b>, a US-based non-profit digital library, well known for it's <a href="https://web.archive.org">Wayback Machine</a> web archive and <a href="https://openlibrary.org">Open Library</a> book digitization and lending service. All fatcat databases and services run on Internet Archive servers in California, and a copy of most fulltext content is stored on the Archive's collections and/or web archives. <p>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 <b>Mellon Foundation</b> (<a href="https://blog.archive.org/2018/03/05/andrew-w-mellon-foundation-awards-grant-to-the-internet-archive-for-long-tail-journal-preservation/">"Long-tail Open Access Journal Preservation"</a>). Fatcat supports this work both by tracking which open access works are not getting preserved in any known archive, and providing minimum-viable indexing and access mechanisms for long-tail works which otherwise would lack them. <p>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 (but 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. <p>The front-page photo of a large feline with a cup of coffee is CC-0 licensed. The name "fat cat" can be interpreted as short for "large catalog", as the service aspires to be a <i>universal</i> (complete) catalog of the digital scholarly record. <!-- TODO: attribution anyways --> <p>A list of technical contributors, including volunteers, is maintained in the source code repository (<code>CONTRIBUTORS.md</code>). Thanks everybody! {% endblock %}