On Wed, 8 Nov 2000, Greg Kuperberg wrote: > While libraries certainly should help preserve e-prints, I do not trust > any one library, nor any other sole institution, to archive material > single-handedly. Any caretaker can lose or destroy a unique copy of > any document... That is why it is important to redundantly and > openly mirror an archive and not just allow third-party searches. The > arXiv has 18 mirror sites on six continents
Who is disagreeing with this? All requisite redundancy is just as desirable, and feasible, and inevitable, with institution-based distributed archiving as with discipline-based archiving. I think there is an incorrect analogy at the heart of Greg's frequent use of the term "fragmented" in speaking about the institution-based approach to self-archiving: I think Greg continues to equate (1) archiving with publishing, and (2) institutional digital "collections" with localized "books-on-shelves" (ripe for a Library-of-Alexandria catastrophe; hence his example of the lost/destroyed "unique document"). And (3) (unrefereed, unpublished) PREprints continue to be treated as the "paradigm" for it all, whereas it is much more informative and representative to see it in terms of (refereed, published) POSTprints: We are, after all, aiming at freeing the REFEREED literature -- with the prepublication embryological stages merely an added bonus, rather than the focus of it all. So, to summarize: Whilst, our refereed papers are already, as they are, safely in the hands of journals and libraries, blissfully mirrored (though unblissfully unfree), we need not fret about Alexandria. Freeing a postprint (sic) via self-archiving (whether central or institutional, interoperable or not) is a bonus, a plus, a freebie, a way to make it accessible to those multitudes worldwide who cannot access it because of the S/L/P firewalls surrounding the safe, Alexandria versions. It is inviting Zeno's Paralysis (again) to say: "Keep waiting till you have an Alexandria-proof centralized, mirrored, redundant arXiv-style Archive to self-archive them in before you dare to self-archive your (already safely mirrored) postprints." Nay! Release them from their hostagehood behind obsolete, impact-blocking, and completely surmountable access barriers online today through self-archiving, addict fellow-researchers the world over to that new, free form of access to it all, and the redundancies and mirrors will come tomorrow, in plenty of time to keep the freed corpus aloft in the skies. (And nothing is at risk: the firewalled version remains as safe -- from catastrophic loss as well as illicit access -- as it ever was.) If that is now transparent for postprints, it should be equally transparent that the same applies to preprints: They are destined to become postprints (hence secure, for the above reasons) anyway. Being available online early is a bonus; a freebie. Moreover, it is bonus that has no prior history of enjoying the safe/secure status of postprints anyway: access to preprints was always restricted and evanescent, destined to be superseded by the secure postprint once it was available. Now the redundancy and mirroring that will be accorded the freed postprint corpus, once it is freed, will also be inherited by the preprint corpus. So there is nothing to lose, and everything to be gained, by self-archiving all preprints and postprints now, in either the centralized OAI-compliant (http://www.openarchives.org) archives like arXiv (http://arXiv.org), or in institutional OAI-compliant archives, like Eprints (http://www.eprints.org). Ignore Cassandras: Preservation problems are eminently soluble, once the goods are up there: the real problem now is how to get researchers to put them up there, at long last. Central archives have gone part of the distance but are proving too slow. Institutional archives are natural allies in hastening us on the road to the optimal and inevitable. > As a rule, it is better for web sites to share the same archive than > to each have fragments. It is better for Oxford and Cambridge to > each have all of Shakespeare's plays than for Oxford to have only the > comedies and Cambridge to have only the tragedies. That is why I favor > shared interoperability, which is in some ways centralized, to fragmented > interoperability, which is optimistically called decentralized. Massive > redundancy is one of the few strengths of the existing paper-based system; I am not an expert on digital storage, coding or preservation, but I am not at all sure that Greg is technically right above (and I'm certain that the Oxford/Cambridge hard-copy analogy is fallacious). I would like to hear from specialists in localized vs. distributed digital coding, redundancy, etc. -- bearing in mind that in the case of the refereed literature, this is all moot anyway, because free access now, is infinitely preferable to no access, no matter how short-lived it risks being. The "locus classicus" is still safely ensconced behind the toll gates. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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]
