On Tue, 22 May 2001, Jim Till wrote: > I'm especially interested > in ways to assess the quality of an eprint archive as a whole, not just > the quality of individual eprints. As in my previous message, I continue > to ask: what criteria should be used to assess the quality of an eprint > archive?
An eprint archive is analogous to a library, not to a journal. (Indeed, journal articles are archived in eprint archives.) So it is either (i) comparing apples and fruit to seek to assess the "quality" of an eprint archive (the quality being assessed is actually the quality of the journals in which the papers appeared -- or rather, of their those journals' peer-review standards), or (ii) the question itself is based on an enthymeme (an unstated premise) that is invalid, namely, that eprint archives are somehow SUBSTITUTES for journals, rather than mere SUPPLEMENTS for them (freeing their contents online, before and after peer review). Archives are no more a substitute for journals and peer review than libraries are. One can do quality measures for a particular library (or archive) but what does that prove? In the past (for serials), it showed how much of the refereed literature that library could afford. In the new era of distributed, interoperable eprint archives, it shows only what happens to appear in one arbitrary fragment of the global virtual library into which the eprint archives are all harvested. > Another criterion (it seems to me) should be its suitability for obtaining > citation data. An example, based on the arXiv archive, is provided by the > Cite-Base search service (http://cite-base.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search) > which (I gather) is based on OpCit citation data, and allows users to rank > searches for reports in arXiv by citation impact or by hits (see The Open > Citation Project, http://opcit.eprints.org/). Correct. But cite-base is not measuring "archive-impact" but paper- or author-impact. And it is measured across multiple distributed archives. What's needed now is more archives, and the filling of them. The quality measures will take care of themselves. The more papers are up there, digitally archived, the more new measures of productivity and impact they will inspire. This is the longer version of an article that has just appeared in the Times Higher Education Supplement: Harnad, S. (2001) Research Access, Impact and Assessment. Times Higher Education Supplement, May 18 2001. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/thes1.html -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 & 01): 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]
