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<h1>About Fatcat</h1>

<p>This 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 file 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, institutional and
other repositories, and the public web.

<p>A few features set fatcat apart from similar indexing and discovery services
in the scholarly communications space:

<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.
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