On Wed, 23 May 2001, Stevan Harnad wrote: [sh]> What two criteria? Certainly the archives should be interoperable [sh]> (that's what www.openarchives.org is about, and what www.eprints.org [sh]> software is for), and certainly the citation-linking and [sh]> impact-ranking should be across all the distributed corpus, just as [sh]> the harvesting is. But apart from that, the only other criteria [sh]> (apart from topic) are "unrefereed/refereed" and, for the latter, [sh]> the journal brand-name (just as before).
My two suggested criteria for evaluating an eprint archive (or, if you prefer, please regard them instead as 'design & usability guidelines' for an eprint archive) are: 1) its suitability as part of an (envisioned) universal archive [an 'inter-operability' criterion?], and, 2) its suitability for yielding citation data [an 'impact-ranking' criterion?]. I understand that Stevan is suggesting a third: 3) its suitability for distinguishing between reports that either have, or have not, been peer-reviewed and/or published in a 'brand-name' journal (either before, or after, being included in the eprint archive) [a 'sign-posting' criterion?]. Now, I'll ask a less theoretical question: To what extent do existing eprint archives conform to guidelines such as these? In the set of existing eprint archives, I'll include not only the arXiv archive and the CogPrints archive, but also (for example) BMJ's ClinMed NetPrints archive and Elsevier's Chemistry Preprint Server (CPS) archive. Other comments on these 'criteria' (or, 'guidelines') would be welcomed (if the 'Re: e-Archiving Challenge' thread hasn't diverted attention away from this one!). Jim Till University of Toronto
