I basically agree with Thomas Krichel on all the substantive points: On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Thomas Krichel wrote:
> institutional archives will lie empty unless there are better > incentives for scholars to contribute to them. If you tell > them that it will open their scholarship to the world to > read, they will listen. If you tell them, figures in hand, > how much it does, and how much impact they gain---relatively > to their colleagues in the offices next door---they will act... > Basically RePEc aims to achieve a type of dataset that will allow > to measure impact I agree. Steve Lawrence has gathered some data along these lines. We are doing so too. And I know you are too. These data will help demonstrate to the research community, quantitatively, the direct causal connection between research access and research impact. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.htm > you have to get authors to self-archive. To do that, you need > to find the right incentives... > publishing is done more with the academic colleagues in mind > rather than with the university's central administration > in mind. Then you inevitably end up with a situation where > you have to get a whole discipline along to self-archive. As > long as others in the discipline are not doing it, there > is little interest in the individual scholar doing it. > You have to demonstrate that to individual academics, figures at > hand. In the meantime you have to collect formally archive contents. I also agree completely that until OAI-compliant self-archiving prevails, havesting or centralized links to authors' arbitrary websites is extremely desirable and useful. I expect that there is an order of magnitude more non-OAI self-archived content (preprints and postprints) on the Web today then there is OAI. Harvesting it (citeseer-style) or linking to it with OAI-equivalent metadata (RePec-style) is not only valuable in itself (making a lot of open-access work more visible and usable) but it will help encourage more self-archiving, as well as providing the access/impact causality data that will help inspire still more! [Les Carr is doing it now with the 2001 UK-wide RAE returns, generating "RAEprints": http://www.hero.ac.uk/rae/submissions/ http://www.rareview.ac.uk/ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.htm ] (I couldn't quite see the point about why individuals couldn't do it, and a whole discipline needs to be convinced. Surely individuals come first, but never mind.) > Incidentally, have you deposited all your papers in institutional > archives? I see some ~harnad above. Of course! All my papers (retroactive to the 70's) have been FTP- and then web-archived since the late '80's, as well as in CogPrints since 1997 and the Southampton ECS Archive since 1999. Both Archives have since become OAI-compliant: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/genpub.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/intpub.html http://makeashorterlink.com/?R3DD514D3 http://makeashorterlink.com/?S60652783 (I practise what I preach!) 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: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess the BOAI Forum: http://www.eprints.org/boaiforum.php/ 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/