Re: EPRINTS = PREPRINTS (unrefereed) + POSTPRINTS (refereed)
I certainly intended the article to reflect the first of the interpretations that Stevan gives, i.e., that self-archiving is for papers at all stages of their evolution from pre-print to post-print. In the paper, I give a very brief (non-official) definition of self archiving as: '...the right of scholars to deposit their refereed journal articles in searchable and free electronic archives' I also talk about authors placing 'a peer-reviewed 'post-print' onto their local institutional repository ensuring that both versions were archived.' Admittedly, this last comment is in relation to the interaction with open access journals, but I agree that authors should be doing that now where they can, even if the paper is published in a subscription-based journal. I plead guilty as charged to my tardiness in making my papers available. The LIBER Quarterly paper (amongst others) is on the SPARC Europe website at: http://www.sparceurope.org/resources/index.html I refer to the free version as a 'pre-print' only because it is the version that I sent before it was printed - it should not vary from the final version as there were no changes (to my knowledge). I am also guilty of not formally archiving my papers in a repository, only of (eventually) placing them on the SPARC Europe website. If anybody has a good suggestion as to a suitable repository I will load them there. I am not sure if the LIBER Quarterly is a 'green' journal or not, but I side-stepped the issue by not assigning copyright. I never give away my copyright or sign a license that will stop me from putting up a version of the final text. I hope that this begins to return me to the ranks of a good citizen! David David C Prosser PhD Director SPARC Europe E-mail: david.pros...@bodley.ox.ac.uk Tel:+44 (0) 1865 284 451 Mobile: +44 (0) 7974 673 888 http://www.sparceurope.org -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: 24 January 2004 14:11 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: EPRINTS = PREPRINTS (unrefereed) + POSTPRINTS (refereed) Subject Thread begins (2000): http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0661.html Open Access News http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html (Friday January 23 2004) contains the following item: OA will transform scholarly communication David C. Prosser, The Next Information Revolution - How Open Access repositories and Journals will Transform Scholarly Communications, Liber Quarterly, 13, 3/4 (2003) (accessible only to subscribers). http://liber.library.uu.nl/cgi-bin/pw.cgi/articles/47/index.html Abstract: Complaints about spiralling serials costs, lack of service from large commercial publishers, and the inability to meet the information needs of researchers are not new. Over the past few years, however, we have begun to see new models develop that better serve the information needs academics as both authors and readers. The internet is now being used in ways other than just to provide electronic facsimiles of print journals accessed using the traditional subscription models. Authors can now self-archive their own work making it available to millions and new open access journals extend this by providing a peer-review service to ensure quality control. Posted by Peter Suber at 11:29 PM. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_01_18_fosblogarchive.html#a10749 1856636195137 I could not access the article as Liber is toll-access; but perhaps David Prosser could explain the last sentence in the above summary: Authors can now self-archive their own work making it available to millions and new open access journals extend this by providing a peer-review service to ensure quality control Without the full text it is hard to know which of two possible senses is intended here. The first sense is spot-on and irreproachable: (1) Authors can now provide open access to the articles they publish in toll-access journals by self-archiving them AND (2) there are also new open-access peer-reviewed journals in which authors can publish their articles. If this is the intended sense of the passage, it is a very welcome statement of the UNIFIED OPEN-ACCESS PROVISION POLICY: (OAJ) Researchers publish their research in an open-access journal if a suitable one exists, otherwise (OAA) they publish it in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it in their own research institution's open-access research archive. But unfortunately there is another possible construal of the above passage, and it would be very helpful if David would clarify whether it was in fact this that he meant: Authors can now (1) self-archive unrefereed drafts of their work and then (2) extend this by submitting them to open-access journals
EPRINTS = PREPRINTS (unrefereed) + POSTPRINTS (refereed)
This Subject Thread begins (2000): http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0661.html Related Threads: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3147.html The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3378.html Open Access News http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html (Friday January 23 2004) contains the following item: OA will transform scholarly communication David C. Prosser, The Next Information Revolution - How Open Access repositories and Journals will Transform Scholarly Communications, Liber Quarterly, 13, 3/4 (2003) (accessible only to subscribers). http://liber.library.uu.nl/cgi-bin/pw.cgi/articles/47/index.html Abstract: Complaints about spiralling serials costs, lack of service from large commercial publishers, and the inability to meet the information needs of researchers are not new. Over the past few years, however, we have begun to see new models develop that better serve the information needs academics as both authors and readers. The internet is now being used in ways other than just to provide electronic facsimiles of print journals accessed using the traditional subscription models. Authors can now self-archive their own work making it available to millions and new open access journals extend this by providing a peer-review service to ensure quality control. Posted by Peter Suber at 11:29 PM. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_01_18_fosblogarchive.html#a107491856636195137 I could not access the article as Liber is toll-access; but perhaps David Prosser could explain the last sentence in the above summary: Authors can now self-archive their own work making it available to millions and new open access journals extend this by providing a peer-review service to ensure quality control Without the full text it is hard to know which of two possible senses is intended here. The first sense is spot-on and irreproachable: (1) Authors can now provide open access to the peer-reviewed articles they publish in toll-access journals by self-archiving them AND (2) there are also new open-access peer-reviewed journals in which authors can publish their articles. If this is the intended sense of the passage, it is a very welcome statement of the UNIFIED OPEN-ACCESS PROVISION POLICY: (OAJ) Researchers publish their research in an open-access journal if a suitable one exists, otherwise (OAA) they publish it in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it in their own research institution's open-access research archive. But unfortunately there is another possible construal of the above passage, and it would be very helpful if David would clarify whether it was in fact this that he meant: Authors can now (1) self-archive unrefereed drafts of their work and then (2) extend this by submitting them to open-access journals to peer-review them. I hope the latter is not what David meant, for it is merely the common error of thinking that self-archiving is only, or primarily, about unrefereed preprints. This is and has always been incorrect. Eprints are electronic drafts of various stages of the same paper. Preprints are drafts *before* the paper is peer-reviewed and accepted for publication, and postprints are drafts *after* the paper has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#What-is-Eprint Self-archiving can provide open access to either the preprint or the postprint draft of an article or both, but the primary target of the open-access movement is of course the postprint, not the preprint! There are 2.5 million postprints published yearly in the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals (1000 of them open-access journals, 23,000 of them toll-access journals), and it is to those 2.5 million postprints, not merely their preprints, that self-archiving is intended to provide open access. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#What-self-archive Preprints are an extra bonus. It is highly recommended that authors self-archive their preprints too: It accelerates the research cycle, physicists have been doing it for decades, and the research community is quite capable (with plenty of prior practise from paper days) of making the distinction between an unrefereed preprint and a refereed postprint (bearing the journal name and date). The rule for unrefereed preprints always was and continues to be: caveat emptor (i.e., use with caution), and the cautious user will wait for the refereed version to appear before risking an attempt to build upon work that has not yet been validated and may prove unreliable or downright wrong (except in special cases where the name and reputation of the author justifies the risk, or the user is expert enough to peer-review it for himself). A
Re: EPRINTS = PREPRINTS (unrefereed) + POSTPRINTS (refereed)
At 09:21 18/05/00 +0100, Thomas Krichel wrote: Steve Hitchcock writes Paul Ginsparg defined an eprint as something self-archived by the author. Isn't that the clearest distinction, and an obvious one for this forum to draw? I tend to think of an eprint as a public-access scientific document in electronic form. The insistance on author self-archiving obscures the fact that there are many eprints that are not archived by the author but by an agent of the author, for example an academic institution or a scholarly society. I suspect this is a view held by many, but it doesn't differentiate eprints from other terms, and leads to the misunderstandings about which this thread was initiated. In addition, what is public-access? Everything in the library domain is public access, even a 10k/year journal, it's just not very easy to access for most. In the context of the Open Archives initiative, for example, there is no debate about author self-archiving. The mission of the OAi is already quite specific: it is A forum to discuss and solve matters of interoperability between author self-archiving solutions. In view of Thomas' comment, I wonder if the significance of this OAi statement has been widely understood. Thomas is right, there are other means and models of archiving, illustrated by the emerging medical archives such as PubMed Central where, incidentally, use of the term eprint seems to be carefully avoided (PMC is a repository of scientific articles). The term author self-archiving doesn't obscure anything. In fact it highlights the issues and agenda very clearly indeed. We are unlikely to sustain eprints = preprints + postprints unless it is based on author self-archiving. Steve
Re: EPRINTS = PREPRINTS (unrefereed) + POSTPRINTS (refereed)
EPRINTS = BOTH PREPRINTS AND POSTPRINTS, BOTH AUTO-ARCHIVED AND ALLO-ARCHIVED On Fri, 19 May 2000, Steve Hitchcock wrote: The term author self-archiving highlights the issues and agenda very clearly indeed. We are unlikely to sustain eprints = preprints + postprints unless it is based on author self-archiving. No one could be more sanguine about author self-archiving than myself, but it is not part of the definition of eprint. Eprints are online digital papers reporting scholarly/scientific research. I'm sending you an eprint if I email you a draft of either my unrefereed preprint or my refereed postprint. (When the digital draft is just sitting inertly in my own machine, it's only trivially an eprint, if an eprint at all.) A fortiori, it is an eprint if it is archived on the Web. But surely it's just as much an eprint if it's archived in a financially fire-walled proprietary archive that charges tolls for access as it is if it is archived in a freely accessible, interoperable open archive (or, for that matter, on the author's home website). The point of this thread was that the equation of eprints with (unrefereed) preprints, as in Declan Butler's Nature article, is incorrect, arbitrary, and misleading. The source of this confusion is multiple. Don't forget that the Open Archive Initiative (OAi) was originally given the tentative name of the Universal Preprint Service (UPS), and that the LANL Physics Archive (now arXiv.org) was originally and often misdescribed as a Physics Preprint Archive and the like, even though, almost from the very beginning (out of its admittedly preprint origins), LANL has consisted of both pre- AND postprints. (Les Carr will soon be writing up and documenting the embryology of eprints along the scholarly skywriting continuum.) Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991). http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting.html So just as reserving the descriptor eprints for unrefereed preprints would be arbitrarily and misleadingly restrictive and unrepresentative, so reserving it for self-archived papers would be -- even though this Forum (the American Scientist Forum on Freeing the Refereed Journal Literature OnLine), as well as http://www.openarchives.org and http://eprints.org are, all three particularly focused on the self-archived literature. So just as eprints are equally eprints whether they are preprints or postprints, so they are equally eprints whether they are auto-archived or allo-archived. There is nothing to prevent journals, for example, from adopting the soon-to-be-released eprints.org open-archiving freeware to set up interoperable, Santa-Fe-compliant open archives of their own, in which the full-texts of all their eprints (postprints allo-archived by the journal for their authors) are accessible only for a fee. It is just that those archives have not been designed for that purpose, but rather for adoption by universities and research institutions, so that their authors can auto-archive their own eprints (preprints and postprints) therein, thereby making them accessible to everyone for free. The research community can then decide for itself whether it prefers to use allo-archived eprints for-fee or auto-archived eprints for-free. Indeed, that is the gist of the Subversive Proposal: Harnad, S. (1995) A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995. http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/ Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Sciencehar...@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.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southamptonhttp://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM NOTE: A complete archive of this ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 99 00): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html You may join the list at the site above. Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
Re: EPRINTS = PREPRINTS (unrefereed) + POSTPRINTS (refereed)
Steve Hitchcock writes Paul Ginsparg defined an eprint as something self-archived by the author. Isn't that the clearest distinction, and an obvious one for this forum to draw? I tend to think of an eprint as a public-access scientific document in electronic form. The insistance on author self-archiving obscures the fact that there are many eprints that are not archived by the author but by an agent of the author, for example an academic institution or a scholarly society. The problem with self-archiving by authors is the growing tendency of authors to deposit their papers in homepages. It is debatable if this sort of activity is real archiving. What we need is to have more agents, acting on behalf of authors that will hopefully make more long-term archiving possible. The archiving through an agent is what I call formal archiving, and I oppose it to the tendency of informal archiving in homepages. My impression is that formal archiving is relatively declining, whereas informal archiving is on the increase. I see the OAi as an attempt of formal archivers to regain initiative. Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel offline 2000-06-04 to 2000-06-11
Re: EPRINTS = PREPRINTS (unrefereed) + POSTPRINTS (refereed)
At 9:21 am +0100 18/5/00, Thomas Krichel wrote: ... The problem with self-archiving by authors is the growing tendency of authors to deposit their papers in homepages. It is debatable if this sort of activity is real archiving. What we need is to have more agents, acting on behalf of authors that will hopefully make more long-term archiving possible. The archiving through an agent is what I call formal archiving, and I oppose it to the tendency of informal archiving in homepages. My impression is that formal archiving is relatively declining, whereas informal archiving is on the increase. I see the OAi as an attempt of formal archivers to regain initiative. Good point. But the problem as we know from other computer science domains is that people need a good reason to bother to formalize information for systems - the cost-benefit tradeoff. One would hope that authors see it in their interest to publish on an OAI server, for instance, but structuring and submitting bibliographic data is extra work. For instance, if an author has already submitted a document to their own organization's report library, they don't want to have to do it all over again for an eprint archive. Various options for getting a new document onto a server whilst minimising the burden on the author suggest themselves: - author takes responsibility to manually submit document to eprint server in addition to any other archives - other archives automatically forward their submissions to eprint archive - all archives become OAI compliant(!) so no forwarding of submissions is required - author's favourite bibliographic management tool (Bib; EndNnote; etc) uploads details to eprint server, which emails author with URL to go to form to complete any missing details - author publishes document citation details on homepage, an intelligent agent spots and parses this, fills out the eprint server form as far as possible and emails author with URL to go to form to complete any missing details - dream on Simon -- ¬ Dr Simon Buckingham Shum Knowledge Media Institute The Open University Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK Mailto:s...@acm.org http://kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs/Tel: +44 (0)1908-655723 eFax: +44 (0)870-122-8765 (personal) +44 (0)1908-653169 (office) Jnl. Interactive Media in Education: http://www-jime.open.ac.uk ¬ What gets measured is not always important, and what is important cannot always be measured A. Einstein
EPRINTS = PREPRINTS (unrefereed) + POSTPRINTS (refereed)
In Souped-up search engines (Nature May 11 2000) http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/search/search.html Declan Butler wrote: in February, the operators of the world's leading archives of electronic preprints, or 'e-prints', agreed standard formats that should allow scientists to search across all of them simultaneously. Two errors here, one small, one not so small. The small one is that it wasn't in February. The other one -- rather bigger and leading to endless misunderstandings -- is that e-prints is NOT synonymous with electronic preprints. (I am beginning to believe that this persistent erroneous equation of the two may be one of the factors delaying us on the road to the optimal and the inevitable.) EPRINTS (or e-prints) are electronic versions of BOTH preprints and postprints. PREPRINTS in turn means pre-refereeing (i.e., unrefereed) research papers, almost all of them prepared for submission to refereed journals (or refereed conference proceedings) for refereeing. POSTPRINTS are post-refereeing (i.e., refereed, revised, accepted final drafts of) research papers, all of them appearing in or soon to appear in refereed journals (or refereed conference proceedings). Incorrectly equating eprints with preprints and forgetting about postprints gives the entirely erroneous impression that the free, online eprint archives are only, or primarily, for unrefereed research. This is not true, and never has been true. Authors can and do self-archive their preprints (first, naturally), and, once they are refereed, revised and accepted, their postprints too, in the same archives (either in place of, or, better, in addition to, their embryonic predecessors). Not making it explicitly clear that eprints = preprints + postprints can lead to confusing either/or statements like these: This Santa Fe Convention will allow e-prints to be tagged as 'refereed' or 'unrefereed', along with other information such as author and keywords. Using software that will become available this month, any scientist could, in principle, set up an e-print or refereed website, or a site of conference proceedings, in the knowledge that it would be compatible with this global system. The first half sounds like it understands that eprints consist of BOTH preprints (unrefereed) AND postprints (refereed), but the second sounds again like EITHER/OR. Let me accordingly make it quite explicit: The refereed/unrefereed tag is meant to distinguish papers (or embryonic stages of papers) in the SAME archive. The soon-to-be-released Santa-Fe-compliant, eprint software in question is intended, in the first instance, for adoption by universities to provide an immediate interperable open archive for the self-archiving of all their researchers papers (pre- and post-refereeing), in all disciplines. The refereed (and journal-name) metadata tags will then allow all the distributed open eprint archive clones to be collected by open search and harvesting services into one global searchable, full-text-accessible virtual collection of the refereed literature, with the user not having to worry about where the actual papers happen to be located. Secondarily, the same software can be used to establish discipline-specific central open eprint archives by Learned Societies, open-archives for Conference Proceedings by Learned Conference Organizers or even journal-specific open-archives by refereed journal publishers. The open eprint archive software, however, is predicated on fire-wall-free access to the full texts for one and all. It is configurable, so in principle that free access can be blocked -- not just for financial fire-walling, but for institution-internal purposes -- however, it was designed in the interests of open rather than restricted uses. The Nature article unfortunately omitted the URL for this software: http://www.eprints.org If these efforts succeed in weaving a seamless web from the scientific literature, researchers should find that the hours spent trawling through pages of irrelevant search returns are consigned to history. Fire-wall-free citaton linking of the entire full-text eprint literature (preprint and postprint) is indeed the optimal and inevitable outcome toward which all these efforts are dedicated. http://opcit.eprints.org/ Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Sciencehar...@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.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southamptonhttp://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM NOTE: A complete archive of this ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 99 00):
