On Fri, 8 Sep 2000, Lynn C. Hattendorf Westney wrote: > the easy availability of (unrefereed) > preprints is downright disturbing to me as I am sure it is to others.
Those who find unrefereed preprints disturbing are advised to ignore them, and stick to refereed postprints. For those active researchers who might, on the contrary, find it useful for their own research to access research findings as early as possible (cognizent of the fact that they have not yet been validated by peer review), don't ignore preprints. Harnad, S. & Carr, L. (2000) Integrating, Navigating and Analyzing Eprint Archives Through Open Citation Linking (the OpCit Project). Current Science (special issue honour of Eugene Garfield) (in press) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.citation.htm Let 1000 flowers bloom. The refereed literature is just a subset of 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 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad [email protected] Professor of Cognitive Science [email protected] 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, Southampton http://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: [email protected]
