On Mon, 16 Feb 2004, Suhail A. R. wrote: > [Arxiv] is mainly for the mathematical sciences.
This is incorrect. Arxiv is mainly for the various fields of physics. Mathematics is a much smaller sector (but an important and growing one). > Both [Arxiv] and [Citeseer] have a very user unfriendly interface and > searches that are not comparable to say for example PubMed. This is correct: The current Arxiv and Citeseer user interfaces are dreadful, but that does not matter in the least, as long as cross-archive harvesters such as http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ or http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search or even http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/ are used. They integrate and re-present the contents of OAI compliant Open-Access Archives such as Arxiv (a central one) as well as the contents of the many distributed institutional OA Archives http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php in a far more useful, useable, and user-friendly form. (That harvesing, integration and re-repesentation was one of the main reasons OAI-interoperability was invented!) PubMed is such a cross-archive harvester, and so far carries some, but far from all of the avialble OA articles in the biomedical sciences. It can and will carry all of them, but there is absolutely no reason for any biomedical researcher to wait till PubMed covers all the OA Archives in biomedical science: no reason whatsoever to wait to *use* the rest of the available OA articles, and no reason whatsoever to wait to make his own articles OA. (I should also add: (1) the longstanding habitual users of arxiv (13 years) and citeseer (8 years) manage just fine, or at least have not complained enough to inspire a much-needed face-lift of these user interfaces. With cross-archive harvesters like OAIster providing far better interfaces to their contents, however, and with the growth of distributed institutional self-archiving http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0023.gif the local user interfaces of the individual OA Archives (whether central or institutional) are becoming less and less relevant. (2) Citeseer is not yet OAI compliant, so it is not harvested by the OAI cross-archive harvesters, but only by Google, which is certainly not enough.) > Furthermore, in the medical sciences, I wouldnt want to self archive > anything till it has been published and indexed on Medline or Pubmed. It is entirely up to the individual researcher whether or not he wants to self-archive his pre-peer-review preprints. But it is irrational in the extreme, once having had the final revised draft accepted for publication, to wait for it to appear in an index before making it avaliable to users by self-archiving it! That would be an arbitrary self-imposed embargo with absolutely no value or utility: merely the unreflective persistence of a dysfunctional habit: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#2.Authentication http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#23.Version > There are many problems related to dissemination of non-published > research and archiving is not recognised for any purpose apart from > helping disseminate information, and that is never the primary intent > of researchers (let's face the facts). (1) We are talking here about the self-archiving of the peer-reviewed, accepted postprint, not the unpublished, unrefereed preprint. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#What-is-Eprint (2) The purpose of making one's peer-reviewed research *public* by publishing them, is so that they can be read, used, applied, cited and built-upon. That is called "research impact." What other "facts" does Suhail have in mind? > In the end, medical researchers at least, will find it easier to email > each other till some other facility comes along. Suhail has already informed us (without telling us the reason why) that he personally prefers that each would-be user of his research should find out (somehow) about its existence (perhaps from an index like Pubmed) and then email him for an eprint, which he prefers to email to requesters, one by one. This is clearly a throwback to the days of mailing paper reprint-requests and mailing paper reprints in return, and Suhail seems to be fond of this obsolete habit. But unless he has a reason to recommend this inefficient and uncessary bottleneck over the much simpler, more direct, and less-time-consuming method that the web era has since brought us -- namely, to self-archive the postprint publicly on the web, let the OAI harvesters pick it up, and let all would-be users click on it to get it for themselves (bothering both themselves less and the author not at all) -- I think Suhail should just chalk this personal preference up to lingering habit (as in the case of those habitual users who still like the unfriendly Arxiv and Citeseer interface) rather than recommending it as an ergonomic principle to be adopted by the rest of us. Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum: To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org Hypermail Archive: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy: BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php