2025 June 17
Evolving the preprint evaluation world with Sciety
This post is based on an interview with Sciety team at eLife.
ACAP has released some documents outlining the use cases they will be testing and some proposed changes to the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) - both robots.txt and META tags. There are some very practical proposals here to improve search engine indexing. However, the only search engine publicly participating in the project is http://www.exalead.com/ (which according to Alexa attracted 0.0043% of global internet visits over the last three months). The main docs are “ACAP pilot Summary use cases being tested”, “ACAP Technical Framework - Robots Exclusion Protocol - strawman proposals Part 1”, “ACAP Technical Framework - Robots Exclusion Protocol - strawman proposals Part 2”, “ACAP Technical Framework - Usage Definitions - draft for pilot testing”.
What would cause other search engines to recognize the ACAP protocols rather than ignore them? A lot of publishers implementing this and requiring search engines to recognize it to index content could put pressure on the engines. Maybe.
Destacando nuestra comunidad en Colombia
2025 June 05