It is easy to say what would be the ideal online resource for scholars and scientists: all papers in all fields, systematically interconnected, effortlessly accessible and rationally navigable from any researcher's desk worldwide, for free.
Both the E-biomed and the Scholar's Forum initiatives http://www.nih.gov/welcome/director/ebiomed/ebiomed.htm http://library.caltech.edu/publications/ScholarsForum/ are extremely timely, important and welcome, and will speed us along the way toward this revolutionary new research resource. They do have a few minor, though easily correctable weaknesses, however. Both are vague about whether the Archives are meant to be (1) journals, (2) competing with journals, or (3) collaborating with journals. The answer is that they are and should be none of these (although eventually collaboration will be possible): Archives are archives, a reliable, permanent place where all authors can self-archive their journal articles on-line for free for all. Journals will continue to be journals, and for as long as there continues to be a demand for a paper edition, or a fee-based digital edition, they can continue to supply that demand. If and when that demand vanishes -- as it is likely to do, because readers prefer to use the free versions in the Archive -- then the associated costs will also vanish, and the only function left for the journals to perform will be quality control and certification. This quality control process is called "peer review": Editors send submitted papers to specialists for refereeing, forward the referee reports (if they are positive) to the authors to guide revision, and, if the final drafts pass the journal's quality standards, they are accepted and certified as published, with that journal's "brand name." This service will still need to be paid for, but it will cost much less than classical publishing, and can be paid for by authors' institutions out of only a small part of what they will be saving from cancelling journal subscriptions. And here is the second weakness to be corrected in the two Archiving initiatives: They are vague about peer review. Peer review is (like democracy) not perfect, and research is being done on ways to improve it. But peer review is what has provided the quality standards of the journal literature, and the primary purpose of the Archives is to free that journal literature, such as it is. The Archive proposals are coupled with some vague plans to modify peer review. But freeing the current journal literature is far too important a goal to be linked in any way to untested reform schemes that could well fail. Again, the remedy is to make it crystal clear that the Archives are for self-archiving by authors. They can self-archive their accepted, published journal papers; that frees the literature and guarantees the current standards of peer review. They can also self-archive unrefereed papers, if they like, making their ideas and findings available more quickly and widely than would otherwise have been possible; but these unpublished papers will not have the journal certification, so those who wish to restrict their reading to the reliable refereed literature can continue to do so. No new, untested levels of quality control should be introduced to confuse either authors or readers; nor is open commentary in the archive a substitute for peer review (though it can be a valuable supplement to it). There is nothing hypothetical about the fact that self-archiving is the optimal and inevitable solution for research and researchers. Physics is already well on the way to having the ideal resource: With over 35,000 daily users in the US alone, the Los Alamos Physics Archive, mirrored in 15 countries worldwide, already has over 100,000 papers and is growing daily. <http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions> This Archive, founded by Paul Ginsparg, is the model for it all; it has been tested, and it is a collossal success. E-biomed and Scholar's Forum will help see to it that all other fields share in this success. One last thing: Los Alamos triumphed because Physicists just went ahead and DID it: They self-archived their unrefereed papers, and, after refereeing and acceptance, they self-archived the final drafts too. The American Physical Society, publisher of the world's most prestigious phsyics journals, now confirms in its copyright agreements that all their authors retain full self-archiving rights, both for the unrefereed preprint and for the refereed final draft. Other publishers have tried to use copyright to prevent authors from self-archiving. There is a monumental conflict of interest in this. Let us hope that the interests of research and researchers -- and hence of the public that funds their work -- will prevail, along the constructive lines that have already been drawn in Physics. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Author.Eprint.Archives/0006.html -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad [email protected] Professor of Cognitive Science [email protected] Department of Electronics and phone: +44 2380 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 2380 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/
