yOn Wed, 20 Nov 2002, [identity removed] asked:: > 1. How many people were involved in the creation of > Cogprints? How many people currently maintain its > collection?
One founder/editor (me), three successive designers (Matt Hemus, Rob Tansley, Chris Gutteridge), several student assistants (Alex Bailey, Tim Brody, Mike Jewell) and faculty colleagues (Les Carr, Wendy Hall, Steve Hitchcock). Almost no maintenance required now. Chris does upgrades, I moderate deposits. > 2. What was the impetus behind the creation of > Cogprints? Were there people involved in its creation > that are not involved in its maintenance? To create an Eprint Archive for self-archiving research in the cognitive sciences. It was funded by joint US/UK support: http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/internationalprojects/intlprojects.html > 3. What demands do users place on Cogprints as an > institution that has changed the way it is organized > and operates? It has since founding been made OAI-compliant -- Open Archives Initiative http://www.openarchives.org/ -- for interoperability. It has also been made into the generic institutional Eprint Archive-creating software, Eprints.org -- http://www.eprints.org/ -- and users are always suggesting features and upgrades. The software has also been turned into journal software (see http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ and http://www.bbsonline.org/ ) > 4. Who are the potential users of Cogprints? Are there > a significant amount of users outside of academia? Do > you use systems to track usage? How is user data > collected (e.g., surveys, e-mail feedback, etc.)? Users are mostly researchers, academics and students in the cognitive sciences, both as self-archiving authors (the researchers) and readers (all of them). Usage is tracked by the usual web hit statistics. We get email and have done a survey: http://www.eprints.org/results/ > 5. Are there legal issues that regulate the way that > Cogprints operates? No. We ask depositors to indicate that they are not violating copyright in depositing, but that is depositors' responsibility, not ours. CogPrints is a place for them to self-archive their work to make it openly accessible to all, like a permanent open-microphone (but with some vetting for relevance and seriousness). http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ > 6. How are submissions to Cogprints filtered? How is > quality of papers in the archive assessed? They are not submissions but deposits, and they consist of pre-refereeing preprints, which are merely vetted for relevance and metadata format, and published postprints, which have been peer reviewed by the journals to which they were submitted and in which they were published. Distinguish self-archiving form publishing: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.4 > 7. Do you ever have to change the format of papers > (e.g., from hardcopy to digital, or even from text to > .pdf)? What helps you decide when these changes in > format must take place? Author must take care of that. We require at least one screen-readable format (pdf, html, xml ascii) so the full-text can be inverted and indexed by google and other search engines. > 8. What influenced you decision to use open archives? > Do you think open archives will have a stronger > presence in academia in the future? Open archives means OAI-compliant archives. CogPrints came before OAI and was then made OAI-compliant. It is an Open ACCESS archive; for the motivation of open access, see the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ It is intended to maximize research visibility, accessibility, usability, usage, assessability and impact. Open access will certainly become universal for all peer-reviewed journals (20,000 journals-worth, 2,000,000 articles per year). We are doing everything we can to hasten the day, which is already long overdue: http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00001685/ > 9. Do you use any techniques to add publicity to > Cogprints (e.g., e-mail, personal reference, etc.)? > Are there plans to do so? Yes, it has email alerting. Please look up the CogPrints online documentation and Eprints features: http://software.eprints.org/ > 10. What made you chose to make the collection > interdisciplinary? How do you decide a submission is > inside/outside of your collection's scope? CogPrints was to be cognitive science from the outset (neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, computer science, philosophy), partly because I am a cognitive scientist and partly to demonstrate that self-archiving is not just beneficial to Physicists -- http://arxiv.org -- but to all disciplines. However, by far the best and most general way to self-archive is through distributed institutional archives, and not just central ones like CogPrints: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#distributed-vs-central Because of OAI compliance, distributed institutional archives can all be harvested, as if they were all just one global archive, by harvesters such as the Cross Archive Search Service (ARC) http://arc.cs.odu.edu/ or http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ or http://www.scirus.com/ and by scientometric analyzers such as http://citebase.eprints.org/ Whether a deposit falls within the archive's scope is a decision for the editor (for a central, discippline-based archive like CogPrints). With institutional archives, it is up to the university or the departments: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00006768/ Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: [email protected] See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm the OAI site: http://www.openarchives.org and the free OAI institutional archiving software site: http://www.eprints.org/
