On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Ken Rouse wrote:
> Various contributors to this forum
> have commented on the resistance of scientists in some fields (chemistry,
> for example) to Steven Harnad's proposals for exploiting internet
> technology to "free" the scholarly literature. A modest way to begin
> breaking down that resistance, I believe, might be the following: the
> establishment by professional societies of servers that would make all the
> conference papers produced at their meetings freely available electronically
> to all who need them--and in a timely fashion! This would pre-empt the
> present one year or more lag in the publication of conference papers in
> print journals.
A good idea, and already within reach to any society that wishes to
implement it. The interoperable archiving software to do it all is
about to be made available; it is (and will remain) free, and so is
all the other software it uses. It is available from:
http://www.eprints.org/software.html
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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:
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