Jim, You are right, all statements to date on this seem to be vague, professing support for OAi but not implementation yet. The key point perhaps, especially as this is a preprint rather than an eprint archive, is whether the journals, say those that accept papers from the CPS, are willing to make data available through OAi. There is no reason why they shouldn't, since for the last year OAi has explicitly had a digital library scope rather than an eprint scope. Except they will have noted there appears to be value in the metadata, currently being realised by CrossRef. The only publisher, as far as I am aware, that is planning to make journals data available through OAi is BioMed Central. Are there others?
Steve At 14:42 15/08/01 -0400, Jim Till wrote:
On Tue, 29 May 2001, I posted message to this Forum which included this criticism of the Chemistry Preprint Server (CPS): [jt]>Another flaw [is that the CPS isn't] on the list of "Open Archives" [jt]>(at: http://oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu/Register/BrowseSites.pl). [jt]>So, the CPS archive doesn't meet an "inter-operability" criterion. I've just received a copy of Volume 4, Issue 33 of the ChemWeb.com News Bulletin (distributed to subscribers via email on August 15, 2001). It's a special issue in recognition of the establishment of the CPS, a year ago (on August 21, 2000 - the CPS is at: http://preprint.chemweb.com). An excerpt from this newsletter: > The CPS was developed by closely following the Los Alamos archives > (http://arxiv.org), which cover physics and related disciplines. In > setting up the service ChemWeb.com has constantly referred to the Open > Archive Initiative (http://www.openarchives.org) for e-print archives. In this excerpt, it's emphasized that the design of the CPS server has been guided by the Open Archives Initiative. But, it seems to me that a crucial element, inter-operability of OAI-compliant eprint archives, probably still isn't being met by the CPS server. I've just visited the current list of registered OAI-conforming repositories (see: http://oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu/Register/BrowseSites.pl). The CPS isn't listed. So, either it's registered but doesn't appear yet on the list, it isn't registered, or it isn't fully OAI-conforming. I suspect that it isn't fully OAI-conforming. Have I missed something? Jim Till University of Toronto
