Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 388.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 08:52:51 +0100
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@COGLIT.ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
Subject: Self-Archiving Why's
[The following forwarded from the Electronic Journal Publishing List
<VPIEJ-L@LISTSERV.VT.EDU> with thanks. --WM]
>[These are excerpts from an interview to appear shortly; URL
>to come when known.]
>
> > Why do you feel so strongly about open archiving online?
>
>Unlike most books and magazine articles, scholarly and scientific
>research papers are written to make an impact on research and
>researchers, not to earn royalty income or fees from sales of the
>text. Hence fee-based access barriers (subscription, site-license,
>pay-per-view [S/L/P]) are impact barriers. Researchers would prefer,
>and would always have preferred, full free access to their research
>reports for everyone. In the paper era, with its expenses, this was not
>possible; the true costs of that means of dissemination had to be paid,
>and they were high. In the on-line era it is possible to free this
>special literature at last, through self-archiving by authors in
>interoperable Eprint Archives. See:
>http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/amlet.html
>
> > Do you feel that research is or will be conducted differently with
> > the use on the Internet and these archives?
>
>Research can only benefit from the much wider, unobstructed reach a
>freed online refereed corpus will provide. Researchers will be far more
>up to date and informed and research will have a much broader impact.
>
>In addition, the online medium is much more interactive, allowing
>commentaries and responses and updates to be linked to the archived
>literature, both pre- and port-refereeing. Citation linking and
>analysis (http://opcit.eprints.org), linked data-sets, and enhanced
>resources for online collaboration are among the other benefits of an
>online digital research corpus.
>
> > When was CogPrints: The Cognitive Sciences Eprint Archive, set up?
>
>Two years ago. First it was a centralized, multi-disciplinary eprint
>archive. Then, with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI)
>(http://www.openarchives.org), which provided meta-data tagging
>standards to ensure cross-archive interoperability, CogPrints was
>upgraded this year into one of the first registered OAI-compliant
>Archives (http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk). The archive-creation software
>was also generalized and made generic so OAI-compliant Eprints Archives
>can now be mounted, registered and filled by any institution
>(http://www.eprints.org).
>
> > How successful is it?
>
>The Los Alamos Physics Archive (http://arxiv.org), up since 1991, has
>130,000 papers; CogPrints, in its 3rd year, has only 1,000. Something
>was needed to accelerate us toward the optimal and inevitable (the
>entire refereed literature online and free), and the hope is that the
>eprints.org software will be adopted by more and more institutions to
>create distributed, OAU-compliant Eprints Archives. Being
>interoperable, these can all be harvested into one global "virtual"
>archive, with papers searchable and retrievable by everyone, with no
>need for users to know in advance which of the Eprint Archives a
>particular paper actually happens to be archived in
>(http://arc.cs.odu.edu/).
>
> > Your vision for the future is to have unlimited online access to all
> > research articles in all disciplines for everyone. How far do you think
> > this ideal has been achieved?
>
>I think that posterity will laugh at us for taking as long as we
>have been taking (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html),
>because we could already have done it a half decade ago
>(http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html). But I think we are at
>last getting around to it now...
>
> > What do you see as the major barriers to achieving these goals?
>
>Chiefly is the sluggishness of human nature, tending to cling to
>old ways even when they are no longer optimal, and easily updated.
>
>That's the main retardant. Others include the (understandable) wish of
>journal publishers to protect their current revenue streams and modera
>operandi by preserving the status quo as long as possible.
>
>There is no point waiting for publishers to scale down to what is the
>optimal and inevitable solution for research: Researchers can take
>matters into their own hands by self-archiving. And this can be done
>legally, now, even if authors are obliged to sign the most restrictive
>copyright transfer agreements
>(http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/2-Resolving-the-Anomaly/sld007.htm).
>
>There is also still confusion (some of it inherent in the questions
>being asked here) about what needs to be freed, and how, confusion
>between the non-give-away literature (books) and the give-away
>literature (refereed research papers), between electronic archiving and
>electronic publication (vanity press), between preprints and
>postprints, between copyright protection from theft-of-text (relevant
>only to non-give-away authors) and copyright protection from theft of
>authorship (relevant to all authors).
>
>But by dint of tireless repetition, these confusions seem to be
>dissipating now.
>
> > What, in your opinion, can be attributed to the success of the Los
> > Alamos Physics archive for unrefereed preprint literature?
>
>Physicists set off on the road to the optimal and inevitable first.
>They still haven't gotten all the way (the Los Alamos Archive is still
>growing only linearly, which would still mean a decade or more before
>it captured the entire refereed literature of Physics), but I hope that
>a proliferation of new interoperable, institution-based Eprint Archives
>will help propel the growth rate into the exponential range.
>
>It will remain an undeniable historical fact, however, that Physicists
>did it first -- not, I think, because self-archiving is more suited to
>Physics in some way, or because Physics benefits more from the freeing
>of its refereed literature than any other discipline: I think
>Physicists did it first simply because they are smarter then the rest
>of us, and more serious about their research, and hence they have much
>less patience with the status quo. We can even estimate how much
>smarter/faster they are by dividing the ten-year contents of the
>Physics Archive by the three-year contents of the CogPrints Archive:
>(130,000/10) / (1000/3) = 39 times as smart/fast...
>
> > Why do you think that other disciplines are slow to follow the
> > CogPrints and Los Alamos archives?
>
>See above. But I think that with distributed, institution-based Eprint
>Archives supplementing central ones, the momentum will now transfer
>across fields -- especially with the help of pressure on researchers by
>their institutions to self-archive their work to maximize its impact
>(and to eventually lighten the institution's serials S/L/P burden).
>
> > Could it be that scientists in other disciplines simply communicate
> > in different ways?
>
>Not in any relevantly different ways. All rely on their respective
>refereed journal literature. No institution can afford S/L/P access to
>it ALL, or even to most of it. So all researchers in all disciplines have
>access to much less than they would use if they could. Moreover,
>on-line access to it all is infinitely better for everyone than
>on-paper access to just an affordable portion of it (on-line includes
>on-paper, because you can always print-off whenever on-screen surfing
>is not enough).
>
>So there are no discipline differences whatsoever here. The reason
>people ask the question has specifically to do with PREprints (i.e.,
>physicists' heavy use and reliance on pre-refereeing drafts of their
>papers). This is irrelevant, because what we are talking about here is
>much bigger than just the preprint question: We are talking about
>Eprints, which includes both pre-refereeing preprints and refereed
>postprints, with the emphasis on the latter, because the latter is the
>refereed literature that self-archiving is intended to liberate!
>
>So just as it makes no difference how much of its free on-line
>literature a discipline prefers to read on-screen or on-paper (the
>essential thing is that it all be on-line and free), so it makes no
>difference how much a discipline prefers to read its literature in
>preprint or postprint form: the essential thing is again that it all be
>on-line and free.
>
>In short: No pertinent discipline-differences at all here.
>
> > Once preprint servers are setup in other disciplines, do you think
> > they will be as successful as the Los Alamos Server?
>
>Yes, and all of them will be more successful than even Los Alamos is
>now, because they will fill exponentially until the entire refereed
>corpus is in there. But (to repeat) we are not talking about "preprint"
>archives, but about EPRINT archives (eprints = preprints +
>postprints). Moreover, we are talking about both Los-Alamos-style,
>centralized, discipline-based archives and distributed,
>multidisciplinary, institution-based archives (eprints.org). The
>essential thing is that they be OAI-compliant, hence fully
>interoperable.
>
> > Have you seen the Chemistry Preprint Server hosted by ChemWeb.com?
>
>Yes. All players are welcome (but they are most welcome when they
>archive both preprints and postprints, and archive them all
>permenently, interoperably, for free for all).
>
> > Do you have any tips to anyone wanting to start up an archive?
>
>Yes, go to eprints.org, pick up the (free) self-archiving software,
>install it at your institution, and have all researchers self-archive
>all their preprints and postprints in it, now. If everyone did that
>today, we would be instantly fast-forwarded to the optimal and
>inevitable: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/10inbrief.html#HARNAD
>
> > How would you like to be remembered?
>
>For the remarkable work I will be able to do once the refereed corpus
>on which it draws is all on-line and freely accessible to me -- and
>to all other researchers.
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------
>Stevan Harnad harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk
>Professor of Cognitive Science harnad@princeton.edu
>Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582
> Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865
>University of Southampton http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
>Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
>SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
>
>NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free
>access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the
>American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00):
>
> http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html
>
>You may join the list at the site above.
>
>Discussion can be posted to:
>
> september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org
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