On Fri, Feb 16, 2001 at 09:10:59AM +0000, Stevan Harnad wrote: > But that is not the mandate of this Forum! This Forum is concerned with > righting just one palpable wrong, one that is clearly in focus, and one > whose righting is clearly within our reach, and is indeed overdue, > namely, the freeing of the refereed research literature, which is and > always has been an author give-away, from all access tolls (and hence > impact barriers) online.
I am entitled to my own reasons for wanting an open archive of research papers. I'll grant you that saving money is a worthy goal. But the costs have never impeded me all that much, not even indirectly through journal cancellations. The immediate drawbacks for me all along have been delay to publication and disorganization of the literature. My dissatisfaction started with my very first research paper, which was written in my senior year in college but only finally distributed when I was finishing graduate school. My point in harping on peer review is that the devastating delay to publication in mathematics, half of which is due to stalling by referees, is also largely pointless. The math arXiv has brought real results in a second research discipline (after physics). I am not by any means the only supporter of the math arXiv, nor do I run it, but I have chipped in quite a bit over the past three years. Many of the other supporters share my reasons, and some of them have their own separate reasons. If, in addition to wanting open archives as you do, we also had to confine ourselves to your reasons for wanting them, you would be chasing away a lot of help. -- /\ Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis) / \ \ / Visit the Math ArXiv Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/ \/ * All the math that's fit to e-print *
