On Wed, 19 Mar 2003, Thomas Krichel wrote: > >tc> You constantly belittle technical problems, and then you wonder > >tc> why the archives are staying empty or do not exist. Answer: because > >tc> these "technical problems" have not been solved. By belittling > >tc> them, you put yourself in the way of finding a solution. > >tc> I did not express myself well I wrote, I meant to say >tc> that much of what Stevan belittles as "technical" is >tc> in fact symptomatic of wider social issues that >tc> impact on the academic self-documentation process.
The Big Koan is: "Why aren't all researchers self-archiving yet, given its benefits and feasibility?" http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html Many people have hypotheses about what is the answer to the Big Koan. 26 Hypotheses are listed in: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#1.Preservation and there are more. Thomas seems to think it may be because of certain technical problems. I think not. But we agree that one good bet might be that it's because the research community is not aware of the existence or size of the access-->impact causal connection, and that this needs to be decisively demonstrated to them. http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.htm http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html >tc> You have >tc> to give academics the motivation to participate. A >tc> reliance on carrot and stick from central administration >tc> is not likely to be sufficient. Demonstrating the size of the access-->impact connection (and how to maximize it, through self-archiving) *is* both a carrot and a stick: The carrot is the rewards of maximizing research impact (salary, promotion, tenure, research funding, prizes, prestige) and the stick is the usual publish-or-perish consequences of *not* maximizing research impact: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.htm http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/archpol.html http://paracite.eprints.org/cgi-bin/rae_front.cgi >tc> it depends >tc> on the discipline. Some will get to self-archive slowly >tc> some fast, some not at all. I can surly imagine a situation >tc> where for legal scholarship you have to pay, but where >tc> physics is free. The only relevant interdisciplinary difference (once the access-->impact connection is demonstrated and known) is if there are any disciplines that do *not* benefit from maximizing research impact: Is legal scholarship an exception, for some reason? (I don't mean all kinds of legal writing, of course, but, as always, only papers published in that discipline's refereed research journals.) Stevan Harnad