Re: EPRINTS = PREPRINTS (unrefereed) + POSTPRINTS (refereed)

[Thomas Krichel]

  Steve Hitchcock writes

 Paul Ginsparg defined an eprint as something self-archived by the author.
 Isn't that the clearest distinction, and an obvious one for this forum to
 draw?

  I tend to think of an eprint as a  public-access scientific document
  in electronic form.  The insistance on author self-archiving obscures
  the fact that there are many eprints that are not archived by the
  author but by an agent of the author, for example an academic institution
  or a scholarly society.

  The problem with self-archiving by authors is the growing tendency
  of authors to deposit their papers in homepages. It is debatable
  if this sort of activity is real archiving. What we need is to
  have more agents, acting on behalf of authors that will hopefully
  make more long-term archiving possible. The archiving through
  an agent is what I call formal archiving, and I oppose it to
  the tendency of informal archiving in homepages. My impression
  is that formal archiving is relatively declining, whereas informal
  archiving is on the increase. I see the OAi as an attempt of formal
  archivers to regain initiative.


  Thomas Krichel   http://openlib.org/home/krichel
   RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
  offline 2000-06-04 to 2000-06-11

Re: EPRINTS = PREPRINTS (unrefereed) + POSTPRINTS (refereed)

[Simon Buckingham Shum]

At 9:21 am +0100 18/5/00, Thomas Krichel wrote:

...

  The problem with self-archiving by authors is the growing tendency
  of authors to deposit their papers in homepages. It is debatable
  if this sort of activity is real archiving. What we need is to
  have more agents, acting on behalf of authors that will hopefully
  make more long-term archiving possible. The archiving through
  an agent is what I call formal archiving, and I oppose it to
  the tendency of informal archiving in homepages. My impression
  is that formal archiving is relatively declining, whereas informal
  archiving is on the increase. I see the OAi as an attempt of formal
  archivers to regain initiative.


Good point. But the problem as we know from other computer science
domains is that people need a good reason to bother to formalize
information for systems - the cost-benefit tradeoff. One would hope
that authors see it in their interest to publish on an OAI server,
for instance, but structuring and submitting bibliographic data  is
extra work. For instance, if an author has already submitted a
document to their own organization's report library, they don't want
to have to do it all over again for an eprint archive.

Various options for getting a new document onto a server whilst
minimising the burden on the author suggest themselves:

- author takes responsibility to manually submit document to eprint
server in addition to any other archives

- other archives automatically forward their submissions to eprint archive

- all archives become OAI compliant(!) so no forwarding of
submissions is required

- author's favourite bibliographic management tool (Bib; EndNnote;
etc) uploads details to eprint server, which emails author with URL
to go to form to complete any missing details

- author publishes document citation details on homepage, an
intelligent agent spots and parses this, fills out the eprint server
form as far as possible and emails author with URL to go to form to
complete any missing details

- dream on

Simon
--

 ¬
 Dr Simon Buckingham Shum  Knowledge  Media  Institute
 The Open University   Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA,  UK
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 http://kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs/Tel: +44 (0)1908-655723
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 ¬
 What gets measured is not always important,
  and what is important cannot always be measured A. Einstein