Greg Kuperberg writes > But I disagree entirely with the claim that distributed > interoperability has never been tried before. It has been tried several > times, whole-heartedly with these two projects: > > MPRESS - mathnet.preprints.org > NCSTRL - ncstrl.org > > And it has been a factor in many other projects, including Hypatia > and the AMS preprint server. Some of these projects are more > successful than others, but *all* of them suffer from inconstancy > of the underlying archives.
The largest project that has been done with a distributed interoperability is RePEc. RePEc catalogs 110000 items now. While there is the occasional case that an archive my become obsolete, from about 140 archives, I think 5 have been made obsolete, i.e. have been moved to a place outside the original archive maintainer's control. Thus while it is problem, it is not a minor one. It is by far outweight by other advantages, such as distributed costs, minimum quality control, and wide community partipation. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel 2000-10-05 to 2001-01-06: Institute for Economic Research / Hitotsubashi University 2-1 Naka / Kunitachi / Tokyo 186-8603 / Japan / +81(0)42 580 8349 [email protected]
