Contributions Profile Issue

There's so much related to the issue, that I've decided to make up a separate page for it.

The current experience with HoPEc shows that many users want to include their recent papers into their profile and often people want to change (correct) the data, provided by some RePEc archive.

While integration with something like EconWPA seems to be a good idea, sometimes it will be an overkill. As we are going to do with institutions data, we could give people the opportunity to submit their document data to people in charge -- it might be easier and more appropriate.

As we have RePEc archives at many institutions, RAS users could use the service to bug their local archive maintainer to update the data. Update the data is here to mean two different things: adding new document records and correcting the existing records.

This is relatively simple with the data correction case: the fixed data should be mailed to the maintainer of the series to which the document belongs.

It is more difficult with submitting new data. We have to find out or give the user choice capability: to which archive or series he wants to submit this new data.

For each registered user we should know what institution(s) she is affiliated with. This could lead us to the archive maintainer, which might be responsible for the user's documents. Before we can try this, we have to collect archive <-> institution relationships data. But people sometimes get published somewhere outside of their primary affiliation, so having institution-archive relationship is not enough: in fact the submitted data might belong to a different maintainer.

Does all this worth thinking about?

More thoughts on collecting data correction requests from the users

While generally correcting data can be simplified well on every service ("Email to this address, if the information above is incorrect"), but in RAS it has the following differences:

• safety of taking the user's advice is higher -- he is likely to be a real academic with an established identity of a RAS profile.
• The data can be entered in a webform and emailed to the maintainer in an appropriate format. Maintainers might like this.
• The corrected data can immediately become part of the person's own profile, so it will be correctly shown on his profile page at least. This will certainly satisfy the authors.

I think, implementing this could make maintaining a RePEc archive (or a metadata collection in general) much simplier, as new records and corrections will come from the system in a ready-to-save metadata form.

Please, comment on this.