On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, Andy Powell wrote: > On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, David Cahill wrote: > > I can also echo these points. At Bath the concerns of academics seem to > fall into three main areas: > > 1) Copyright - i.e. does my publisher allow self-archiving after > publication? > 2) Impact of pre-print on future publication - i.e. will my publisher > be willing to publish if I've self-archived a pre-print? > 3) Quality control - i.e. do I want my peer-reviewed material to appear > in an e-print archive alongside non-peer-reviewed material?
May I suggest using some of the pertinent passages on copyright, Embargo/Ingelfinger-Rule, and Preprint/Postprint/Peer-Review in the BOAI FAQs: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ > To try and help with concerns 1) and 2) we plan to maintain a table > listing key publishers (i.e. the most used publishers for publishing by > University of Bath staff) with a summary of, and links to, their attitutes > to self-archiving. If nothing else, it will be interesting to see how > this table changes over the next few years... Let's hope it won't all wait for the next few years! > To help (a little) with 3), we have modified the default 'abstract' view > to explicitly indicate whether the publication has been peer-reviewed or > not. Good idea. (That is the purpose of the "refereed" tag in Eprints, but the more explicit the better.) > On top of this, there is some general confusion about whether an > institutional e-print archive is intended as an alternative to current > publishing practice. (E.g. what happens to peer-review if everything is > only published in an institutional archive?). We are now very careful > *not* to use the word 'publish' when we talk about depositing materials > with the archive. Good idea. Not only should you not use "publish" but you should not use "submit" either: See: "1.4. Distinguish self-publishing (vanity press) from self-archiving (of published, refereed research" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.4 University Eprint Archives are for the self-archiving of university research output, both pre- and post- peer-reviewed-publication. Papers are SUBMITTED to journals, but merely DEPOSITED in archives. The more explicitly the peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed sectors are sign-posted, the better, both to answer questions in the minds of prospective self-archiving authors and to maximize the transparency and usefulness of the archive to prospective users. > The library at Bath have recently undertaken a small-scale survey (about > 100 people) of academic attitudes to e-print archives (both subject-based > and institutional) and hope to summarise it in a forthcoming Ariadne > article. Trouble with surveys in transitional eras is that they tend to reinforce misperceptions by reiterating them! I hope the survey of current opinion and informedness will be counterbalanced by correct information too! > Also, as mentioned below, general confusion about impact of OAI-PMH. The > general assumption is that if material is deposited in a University of > Bath e-print archive, then it will only be found by people directly > searching the archive using the University of Bath Web site. (And > therefore that it is not worth depositing anything because no wider > exposure is gained). This is what I mean. No matter how widely this opinion is held, it is 100% incorrect! Far more helpful than a survey of the current state of ignorance about this would be a concerted effort to remedy it with the correct information... > In a UK context, one would hope that some of the initiatives funded under > the JISC FAIR call, e.g. ePrints-UK > > http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/proposal/ > > will help to raise awareness of some of the possibilities for > cross-archive discovery services. > > Finally, I have also heard concerns about the legal status of e-prints, if > ideas are stolen from pre-prints in institutional archives and then > 'formally' published by a third-party more quickly than by the original > author. Although publicly archived preprints do not count as peer-reviewed publications, they certainly count as public evidence of (and a good way to establish) priority. Moreover, they are the author's intellectual property, subject to copyright, and evidence for prosecuting plagiarizers. See the Self-Archiving FAQs on priority and plagiarism: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#12.Priority http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#11.Plagiarism See also: "Authenticating Publicly Archived Material: Hashing/Time-Stamping" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0807.html > Related to this, I guess, are concerns over the impact of > self-archiving on future patent applications. Simple solution: Whatever you would not PUBLISH anyway, don't self-archive either! Eprint Archives are for research findings the author wishes to make public, by publishing them. Neither publication nor self-archiving are for findings the author wishes to conceal. But see: "Establishing Priority for Patents" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1159.html Stevan Harnad