On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > sh >[I might add only that the distinction between "personal web home page" > sh >and "e-print servers" is silly, incoherent, and hence untenable, but it > sh >makes no difference, if it makes some people happy to put it that way...] > > There is distinction that to many authors may be important: > > E-print servers that are well stocked are a somewhat more convenient place > to look for particular articles compared to hunting down the authors' home > pages and looking there. Of greater consequence, researchers who are not > looking for articles by the authors in question may find articles by them > on that well-stocked e-print server, like them, and use them.
Quite right, and this is one of the principal rationales for the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) http://www.openarchives.org and Eprints archive-creating software http://www.eprints.org OAI provides a tagging standard that makes all registered OAI-compliant Archives interoperable, hence harvestable across archives http://oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu/Register/BrowseSites.pl so you need not know the URL of the paper or the author. You just search them like one big virtual archive in a centralized index: See http://cite-base.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search and http://arc.cs.odu.edu/ But the home-page/public distinction is moot, since authors can run their own eprints servers too, and register them as OAI-compliant! http://rocky.dlib.vt.edu/~oai/cgi-bin/Explorer/oai1.0/testoai -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
