On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, Chris Armstrong wrote: > Steve Hitchcock may have answered this to some extent: > "a good eprint archive is an authority because it > provides a service that is clearly labelled."
The Eprints software -- http://www.eprints.org -- provides this clear labelling: (1) It is fully complaint with the Santa Fe convention for meta-data tagging and interoperability. Hence every institution that mounts the (free) Eprints software can immediately register as an Open Archive -- http://www.openarchives.org/sfc/data_provider_template.htm -- interoperable with all the other registered Open Archives. The contents of all these distributed Open Archives can and will all be harvested into one seamless, global "virtual" Archive. (2) Anyone searching the literature can restrict their search to these Eprints Archives, thereby ensuring that they only access Santa-Fe-compliant data. (3) Among the (actual and potential) metadata fields for the Eprints Archives are the following: (a) (actual) REFEREED/UNREFEREED (b) (actual) JOURNAL NAME (etc.) (c) (potential) UNOFFICIAL/OFFICIAL (author-supplied/publisher-supplied) > My worries > have to do with uninformed or naive use - something which > may be impossible or unlikely if items ARE labelled and > if the label is sufficiently informative. If you can think of further pertinent labels, eprints.org can be configured to include them too. It is upgradable to keep pace with evolving metadata-tagging practices. >sh>trivial semantics of "publishing" ... The typescript Q >sh>sent to me above, is a "publication," by this general >sh>(and irrelevant) legal definition. > > NO it is not - publication means making available or > disseminating to a mass not to one individual (Publish: > to make generally known; publisher: one who distributes > to the public). You are confusing the issues with these > statements. I am not a lawyer, and nothing of any substance rides on this, but I believe you are factually wrong. ONE COPY is sufficient to qualify as a publication, by the legal definition -- a text I scrawl on a piece of paper, for example, and give to you, is legally a "publication" (and can, for example, be used to assert copyright and intellectual ownership). I repeat: This technical definition is of no interest here. What is of interest is not what the lawyers consider publication, but what the the research community, funding agencies, and academic review committees consider publication, and that is publication in a refereed journal, with a publisher, whose imprimatur is the official "certification" of the quality-level of that paper. There is also Vanity Press (unrefereed) publication, of course, including self-publication on the Web, but as this form of publication is not officially quality-controlled, the question of whether or not a draft is "official" becomes rather less consequential. However, even for Vanity-Press/self-publication, it is possible to date-stamp and authenticate versions (as Adrian Pickering has indicated in this Forum). So even here, there is no principled problem. Perhaps the root of the misunderstanding here is that you are confusing self-archiving with self-publication. It is certainly possible to self-archive an unrefereed preprint and leave it at that; and that would indeed constitute self-publication. But that is not the primary purpose of the Eprint Archives under discussion here. Self-Publication is a SUBSTITUTE for conventional, refereed-journal publication, and that is not a model being advocated or particularly discussed here. What is being discussed here is self-archiving (not self-publication) as a SUPPLEMENT to refereed-journal publication, for the purpose of freeing the published refereed (and not yet-published, pre-refereeing) research literature. Being merely a supplement to and not a substitute for conventional refereed-journal publication, self-archiving should not be regarded as an alternative form of publication; it is and should be regarded as an alternative means of access to refereed publication (including to unofficial copies as well as pre-refereeing copies). Those versions can be tagged and authenticated as minutely as we wish, but existing practise already suggests that such heroics are not necessary -- and they are certainly nothing to defer self-archiving for, not even for a nanosecond. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~ijh198/opcit/ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~tdb198/opcit/ >sh>For if there IS an official, published version, and it >sh>resides in the pages of journal Q, then it seems that >sh>the web versions are very much like author-supplied >sh>typescripts; > > Not at all. The difference lies in their authority in > being published by the "official" publisher on the web > site of that publisher. I think we have now repeated our respective positions sufficiently often. You set more store by the "official" stamp than the research community does (for the huge portion of the refereed literature to which their institution does not give them access): Having an unofficial version of everything in hand for free now is preferable to waiting for the off-chance that the official versions can be made free someday -- or that the unofficial versions can be made official. >sh>The sign-posts can be made as clear as we like. >sh>(Self-archived drafts could even carry a health warning, >sh>if people thought it necessary!) > > So now we come to the crux of the matter: I DO, > EMPHATICALLY think it is necessary that they carry a > health warning (your phrase): a label stating clearly > what the paper is. The label should be a part of _each_ > paper (much like a copyright statement or a title page) > and should have standard form and content. Fine. As I said, the format and labelling of the Eprints Archives is configurable. If the rest of the research community feels that they would like such a health-warining on every item that is not from the publishers proprietary archives, it can be provided. (Now can we move on from these a-priori worries to more substantive questions?) > Only this will give true LIBERATION of access; without > labelling the liberation may entrap the unwary! I know > physicists have been doing this for some years (archiving > not entrapping, sorry!). My concern is that should your > approach be adopted wholesale, some archives may not be > so well administered and may not make their function and > status clear to naive users. As free official publishers' versions will initially be the exceptions rather than the rule in Eprints Archives, I would make the more parsimonious proposal that when a browser is set to search Eprints Archives (only), it is the (rare) official publishers' versions that should carry the tag OFFICIAL; and the default assumption should be unofficial. That will save a lot of screen-space. I think the research community is capable of keeping that in mind, while profiting from the windfall of a newly freed research literature. The important thing to remember is that these are not issues of substance, and should not detain us from mounting Eprint Archives and self-archiving, so as to free the refereed literature, now. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.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]
