Ebs Hilf -- who will host a meeting on the subject next week: http://physnet.physik.uni-oldenburg.de/projects/SINN/sinn03/programme.html -- confirms that the rate of growth of the biggest and oldest open-access archive -- the Physics Arxiv -- is still far, far too slow. I entirely agree.
This does not diminish from the credit from Arxiv's having been the first; but now, 12 years down the road, this unchangingly slow rate suggests that something more may be needed than what has been feeding Arxiv across the years, and my own guess (and Ebs's) is that that something more may well be distributed institution-based self-archiving, instead of Arxiv's central discipline-based self-archiving. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/archpolnew.html The reason institutional self-archiving is more likely to speed up self-archiving and to generalize it across disciplines is that researchers and their institutions both share the benefits of the impact of their research output, whereas researchers and their disciplines do not. It is not the discipline that exercises the incentive of the "publish-or-perish" carrot-and-stick on researchers, it is their research institutions. As the co-investor in and co-beneficiary of the rewards of research impact (research funding, overheads, reputation, prizes) the researcher's institution is in a position to mandate not only "publish or perish" but "publish with maximal impact" -- which means maximal access, which means open access, which means self-archiving. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/ I think on all this we agree with Ebs Hilf. Ebs too notes the likely remedy for the sluggish growth rate of self-archiving in physics: institutional (indeed, departmental) self-archiving. What is needed to accelerate that is compelling empirical demonstrations of the correlation between access and impact, to make researchers and their institutions realize that self-archiving is in their own interest (and how much so) -- in all disciplines. There is, however, in Ebs's summary below, a rather important and potentially misleading ambiguity: He conflates self-archiving with publishing -- referring to depositing papers in Arxiv as "publishing" them, in contrast to "self-archiving" them in institutional eprint archives. But surely *both* of these are self-archiving and not publishing! The publishing is done in the journals (in both cases). The self-archiving is merely the provision of a supplementary version of the paper, its full-text accessible online toll-free for all would be users webwide (in either a central discipline-based eprint archive or in distributed institution-based eprint archives). Both central disicplinary archives like Arxiv and distributed institutional archives include, in addition to the all important peer-reviewed, published version of each article (the "postprint") also the pre-peer-review preprint version(s) and sometimes also postpublication updated and enhanced versions ("post-postprints"). But the critical version, and the one that counts as the publication, is of course the published postprint: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2239.html . That (and not unpublished preprints or revisions) is what "publish-or-perish" is all about! http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.4 But apart from these minor points, I don't think Ebs and I disagree. Here is the quote/commentary: On Wed, 10 Sep 2003, Eberhard R. Hilf wrote: > Dear Stevan and the list members, > here are some arguments for > 1. All physicists will publish in the ArXiv not before the year 2050, > although the arxiv size is growing quadratically, not linearly with time. > Earlier estimates [St. Harnad, > http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.htm > slide 25 are to be revised]. > [see http://isn-oldenburg.de/~hilf/ ] If readers look at slide 25 above, they will find that according to Ebs's estimate (which I accept!), it would have to be revised to extend the linear growth from 2020 instead to 2050. According to Ebs, at the present growth rate, 2050 would be the first year in which *all* physics articles published in that year are self-archived in Arxiv. But note that that's *self-archived* in Arxiv, not *published* in Arxiv: There is absolutely no reason to believe that all those articles will not continue (*exactly* as they all do now) being published in the appropriate peer-reviewed journal for their area and their quality-level. ("Publication" will continue to mean, as it does now, peer-review and certification of having met that journal-name's quality standards.) And the rate of growth of the portion of total annual published journal article output in physics that is self-archived will grow (linearly!) from now till it reaches 100% in 2050, at exactly the same unchanging rate at which it has been growing for 12 years now. > 2. Usage of repositories seems to be proportional to their size, > but independent of absolute size. > The full text you find at > http://www.isn-oldenburg.de/~hilf/publications/arxiv-analyis.ps > physicists will publish in the ArXiv not before the year 2050 Usage means downloads of papers, as opposed to deposits. It will be interesting to see the figures as the number of distributed institutional eprint archives ("repositories") grows. Each university will have an eprint archive in each of its disciplines. All eprint archives will be OAI-compliant. All will be harvested by cross-archive search-engines such as oaister http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ and citebase http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search and even Elsevier's scirus http://www.scirus.com/ Of course the number of downloads from a particular eprint archive will be proportional to its size (and the quality of its eprints), but it will also be indicative of the research impact of that institution. (No real equivalent for a central archive.) > The ArXiv is unique in that it serves its own usage and submission logs. So will the institutional eprint archives. > Other new developments may have a much steeper rise of spreading, > notably the self-archiving by the authors, their institutes or > Universities and their libraries forming a distributed net of repositories. I certainly hope so -- and there is also reason to expect it, for the carrot/stick reasons shared by researchers and their institutions. > The advantage is its scalability, flexibility, the business model > (distributed funding by the institutions of the creators of the > documents), > the retaining of the author's rights, the update possibility, > and the acceptance spreading: to convince a large body such as a > learned community to set up a central service such as the ArXiv for > physics > is much harder, then to convince a percentage of local distributed > institutions > and institutes (the multiple small versus one large barrier chance). It takes little to persuade institutions to maximize their own research impact (in all its disciplines). Larger central bodies have no such shared interests with their depositors. By the way, there is no great author-rights retention problem: The only right in question is the self-archiving right, and 55% of the 7000+ journals sampled so far by Romeo already formally support self-archiving, while many of the rest will agree if asked on a per-paper basis. http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm And there is always the preprint+corrigenda for the rest: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#copyright1 > The challenges are to set up the needed international standards, What standards (apart from OAI-interoperability plus multilingual capability)? > to allow intelligent search engines to serve the retrieval, Look at the many ingenious OAI search engines that have already been spawned, even by the minimal open-access content available so far! http://www.openarchives.org/service/listproviders.html > to stimulate the discussion and communication between the authors, Mike Jewell has almost finished a variant of Eprints -- Jprints -- a generic version modeled on its two open-peer-commentary journal variants, bbsprints and psycprints) in the same way eprints was modeled on CogPrints. Jprints will be GNU open-source software for self-archiving both articles and commentaries and author-responses. http://www.eprints.org/ http://www.bbsonline.org/ http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ Simon Buckingham Shum has created similar generic commentary software in association with eprints too: http://d3eprints.open.ac.uk/ > At present, the ArXiv is still unique in serving unconditional time stamp, > and long term readability. All eprint archives can and will provide date stamps. XML documents are the target for long-term readability (Jprints will generate XML) but for now, when content is thin, beggars cannot (and should not) be choosers! Eprints accepts any format that includes a screen-readable version (XML, HTML, PDF, PS, TeX, ASCII). > All (usage) numbers are astonishingly low, as we know from libraries usage > of journals and books. I couldn't follow this. If you mean the average article has astonishingly few users, that's true. But the relevant thing is how many *more* users it has if it is open-access than if it is toll-access! (And how many more citations that eventually generates.) Stevan Harnad