On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, Andy Powell wrote:
On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, David Cahill wrote:
I can also echo these points. At Bath the concerns of academics seem to
fall into three main areas:
1) Copyright - i.e. does my publisher allow self-archiving after
publication?
2) Impact of pre-print on future publication - i.e. will my publisher
be willing to publish if I've self-archived a pre-print?
3) Quality control - i.e. do I want my peer-reviewed material to appear
in an e-print archive alongside non-peer-reviewed material?
May I suggest using some of the pertinent passages on copyright,
Embargo/Ingelfinger-Rule, and Preprint/Postprint/Peer-Review in the
BOAI FAQs:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
To try and help with concerns 1) and 2) we plan to maintain a table
listing key publishers (i.e. the most used publishers for publishing by
University of Bath staff) with a summary of, and links to, their attitutes
to self-archiving. If nothing else, it will be interesting to see how
this table changes over the next few years...
Let's hope it won't all wait for the next few years!
To help (a little) with 3), we have modified the default 'abstract' view
to explicitly indicate whether the publication has been peer-reviewed or
not.
Good idea. (That is the purpose of the refereed tag in Eprints,
but the more explicit the better.)
On top of this, there is some general confusion about whether an
institutional e-print archive is intended as an alternative to current
publishing practice. (E.g. what happens to peer-review if everything is
only published in an institutional archive?). We are now very careful
*not* to use the word 'publish' when we talk about depositing materials
with the archive.
Good idea. Not only should you not use publish but you should not use
submit either:
See:
1.4. Distinguish self-publishing (vanity press) from self-archiving
(of published, refereed research
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.4
University Eprint Archives are for the self-archiving of university
research output, both pre- and post- peer-reviewed-publication. Papers
are SUBMITTED to journals, but merely DEPOSITED in archives.
The more explicitly the peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed sectors are
sign-posted, the better, both to answer questions in the minds of
prospective self-archiving authors and to maximize the transparency and
usefulness of the archive to prospective users.
The library at Bath have recently undertaken a small-scale survey (about
100 people) of academic attitudes to e-print archives (both subject-based
and institutional) and hope to summarise it in a forthcoming Ariadne
article.
Trouble with surveys in transitional eras is that they tend to reinforce
misperceptions by reiterating them! I hope the survey of current opinion
and informedness will be counterbalanced by correct information too!
Also, as mentioned below, general confusion about impact of OAI-PMH. The
general assumption is that if material is deposited in a University of
Bath e-print archive, then it will only be found by people directly
searching the archive using the University of Bath Web site. (And
therefore that it is not worth depositing anything because no wider
exposure is gained).
This is what I mean. No matter how widely this opinion is held, it is
100% incorrect! Far more helpful than a survey of the current state of
ignorance about this would be a concerted effort to remedy it with the
correct information...
In a UK context, one would hope that some of the initiatives funded under
the JISC FAIR call, e.g. ePrints-UK
http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/proposal/
will help to raise awareness of some of the possibilities for
cross-archive discovery services.
Finally, I have also heard concerns about the legal status of e-prints, if
ideas are stolen from pre-prints in institutional archives and then
'formally' published by a third-party more quickly than by the original
author.
Although publicly archived preprints do not count as peer-reviewed
publications, they certainly count as public evidence of (and
a good way to establish) priority. Moreover, they are the author's
intellectual property, subject to copyright, and evidence for prosecuting
plagiarizers.
See the Self-Archiving FAQs on priority and plagiarism:
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#12.Priority
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#11.Plagiarism
See also:
Authenticating Publicly Archived Material: Hashing/Time-Stamping
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0807.html
Related to this, I guess, are concerns over the impact of
self-archiving on future patent applications.
Simple solution: Whatever you would not PUBLISH anyway, don't self-archive
either! Eprint Archives are for research findings the author wishes to
make public, by publishing them. Neither publication nor self-archiving
are for findings the author
