I agree with Harnad that the key to understanding the success of arXiv is the pre-existing fax-based preprint culture. I'm even willing to agree that institutional repositories will be necessary for the trend to spread to a wide range of other disciplines. The question, though, is whether they (and the host of other factors within our control such as availability of good software to make self-archiving easy) are sufficient.
One way to phrase the question returns to preprint culture. Can we easily imagine a world of 1990 where Chemistry had a preprint culture? I think not -- the pressures of industry funding for chemistry and chemical engineering, and the constraints on prior publication posed by international patent law, made it essentially impossible to have a chemistry analog of the physics culture. The prohibition on preprints was enshrined in journal policies, where the editors took very seriously the idea that they should never accept a submission if it even smelled of having been released to the public as a preprint. Fast forward to 2002, and we still have Chemistry as a problem discipline for self archiving, ETDs, and eprints. You may want to dispute my characterization of Chemistry, since it seems to imply that Chemistry will be a very hard nut to crack. You may want to point out other disciplines where there are in fact active precursors of a successful eprints culture. But I think we're stuck with one basic observation (shared by Arunachalam, Harnad, and me): that disciplines do have different cultures, and that these cultures do impact the rate of adoption of changes in scholarly publishing. JQ Johnson Office: 115F Knight Library Academic Education Coordinator e-mail: [email protected] 1299 University of Oregon 1-541-346-1746 (v); -3485 (fax) Eugene, OR 97403-1299 http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj
