This is a reply to a query that might be of more general interest. I have deleted identifiers:
---------- Forwarded message ---------- On Fri, 13 Oct 2000 XXX wrote: > Dear Dr. Harnad, > > XXX and I have been discussing how to get > academics to contribute to a scholarly archive. Recently XXX > came to XXX and told us about your recent work. > > Perhaps I have misunderstood the story, > but I believe he said that you gave them a list of > publishers which had been approached on this issue, and which said that > for articles to be published in the print organs of those publishers, it > is ok for those articles to also be put into pre- and post-print servers. > > If I have somehow mangled the true version of events, please forgive me. > On the other hand, if there is such a list, XXX and I would dearly > love to see it..; and could you please share it with us? It is a bit mangled. Here it is, correctly sorted out: (1) There are now Online Archives that specialize in archiving the contents of refereed journals, deposited by the journal publishers themselves. The most prominent example is PubMed Central, which archives, for example, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: http://www.nih.gov/about/director/pubmedcentral/pubmedcentral.htm (2) There are other Archives that specialize in archiving the pre-refereeing and post-refereeing drafts of papers in refereed journals, but self-archived by the author (not the publisher): http://arxiv.org/ http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk (3) My estimate is that about 70% of journals will today agree to changing their copyright agreements, if authors explicitly request it, such that all rights to sell the paper, on-line and on-paper, are transfered to the publishers, reserving for the author only the right to publicly self-archive it online; 10% of journals (e.g., all the journals of the American Physical Society <ftp://aps.org/pub/jrnls/copy_trnsfr.asc>) already have copyright agreements that explicitly allow online self-archiving by their authors. About 20% of journals would NOT agree to such a copyright agreement, but this can be legally circumvented anyway, by simply self-archiving the pre-refereeing preprint before submission, and linking a "corrigenda" file afterward. (I have dubbed this the "Harnad/Oppenheim" strategy): <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html>. http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/copyright.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.scinejm.htm (4) Free OAI-compliant, <http://www.openarchives.org/> hence interoperable eprint archive-creating software is now available so that all universities can immediately install eprint archives in which all their researchers in all disciplines can self-archive all their papers, preprint and postprint (or preprint + corrigenda): http://www.eprints.org Being interoperable, and sharing the critical metadata tags (title, author, etc.) the contents of these distributed eprint archives will then be harvested into global meta-archives which can then be searched, and any paper freely retrieved, by anyone, anywhere, as if they had the entire refereed journal literature on their desktops, for free: http://arc.cs.odu.edu/ Sincerely, 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 the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online 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]
