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<h1></h1>

<p>Fatcat is a 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.

<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, 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
<b><a href="mailto:webservices@archive.org">webservices@archive.org</a></b>.

<h3>Goals and Features</h3>

<p>A few things set Fatcat apart from similar indexing and discovery services:

<ul>
  <li>inclusion of archival, <b>file-level metadata (hashes)</b> 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 <b>archival web
  captures and datasets</b>, as well as content stored on the distributed web
  <li>data model that captures the <b>work/edition distinction</b>,
  grouping pre-print, post-review, published, re-published, and updated
  versions of a work together
  <li><b>public editing</b> 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 <b>reduce the risks of centralized control</b>
</ul>

<p>This service aspires to be a piece of sustainable, long-term, non-profit,
open source, collaborative, digital infrastructure. It is primarily
designed to support the <i>archival</i> and <i>dissemination</i> 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, and is not intended to be used for
<i>evaluation</i> of individuals, institutions, or venues. This service is
"universal", not curated. This means that it includes retracted works
(annotated and disclaimed as such) and content some may consider "predatory
publishing".

<h3>Sources of Metadata</h3>

The source of all bibliographic information is recorded in edit history
metadata, which allows the provenance of all records to be reconstructed. A few
major sources are worth highlighting here:

<ul>
 <li>Release metadata from <b>Crossref</b>, via their public
 <a href="https://github.com/CrossRef/rest-api-doc">REST API</a>
 <li>Release metadata and linked full-text content from NIH <b>Pubmed</b> and <b><a href="https://arxiv.org">arXiv.org</a></b>
 <li>Release metadata and linked public domain full-text content the <b>JSTOR</b> Early Journal Content collection
 <li>Creator names and de-duplication from <b>ORCID</b>, 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><a href="https://guide.{{ config.FATCAT_DOMAIN }}/sources.html">The 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 its
<a href="https://web.archive.org">Wayback Machine</a> web archive,
<a href="https://openlibrary.org">Open Library</a>, and book digitization and
lending services.

<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 by both tracking which open access works are in known
archives 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 (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.

<p>The front-page photo of a large feline with a cup of coffee is by
<a href="http://www.kampschroer.com/photography.html">Quinn Kampschroer</a>,
under a CC-0 license. The name "Fatcat" can be interpreted as short for "large
catalog", as the service aspires to be a <i>complete</i> catalog of the digital
scholarly record.

<p>A list of technical contributors, including volunteers, is maintained in the
source code repository (<code>CONTRIBUTORS.md</code>). Thanks everybody!

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