On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, [Anonymous] wrote: > I do not quite agree with you on the assertion that eprint services and > personal web pages are the same; the former have the distinction of being > maintained by some organisation which intends / commits to perpetuity and > may add additional useful indexing metadata
They are the same, LEGALLY speaking -- no legal distinction, with respect to copyright, can be based on the degree to which one is more/less "public" than the other. You are quite right, however, that there are PRACTICAL differences between them (but those do not affect the copyright question under discussion here, which is a legal question, about the wording for copyright transfer agreements). There is a HUGE difference between an author's possibly here-today/ gone-tomorrow home-page and an abiding institution's robust Eprint Archives, backed by a preservation commitment from its library and administration. That is why we are now putting so much emphasis on the institutional rather than the individual solution to the problem of freeing the refereed research literature online. But the impossibility of making a legal distinction here is very important anyway, for the following reason: The biggest retardant on progress is the rate at which refereed research CONTENT is going online -- whether in institutional eprint archives or authors' home-pages. What is most important and most urgent at this time is to get that content up there. Once it is up there, there will be many, many ways to make it more secure and permanent. (We at Southampton, for example, and others, are designing software that will automatically copy papers from authors' arbitrary home-page archives to OAI-compliant Eprint Archives.) So needless worries about permanence and preservation should not be allowed to hold back content: Go ahead and archive it, even in your author's home-page, now, if need be (google and researchindex will find it for now). And tomorrow will take care of itself (with the help of those committed to both the Open Archives Initiative and the Self-Archiving Initiative: (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/) -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
