Publishing quote
Thought I would share these words of wisdom with this listserv. You can publish the Journal of Left Earlobe Anatomy, and you can say it's free to the world, but if very few people come and look at it...then it doesn't make any difference. Robert D. Bovenschulte, ACS Publications, Division Director Lynn C. Hattendorf Westney, Associate Professor, Assistant Reference Librarian Coordinator of Reference Collection Development and Coordinator of CRRC: Career and Resume Resources Collection The University of Illinois at Chicago The Richard J. Daley Library (MC/234) Box 8198, Chicago, IL 60680-8198 USA Reference Department: 312-996-2728 Lynn's Office: 312-413-3045 (bounces back to Reference after 4 rings)FAX: 312-413-0424
Re: Self-Archiving and the reaction of publishers
Actually, copyright exists in the same force for items not published as for items published. The only difference really exists in the sense that sales can be hurt for commercially published materials. However, if someone violates your copyright by publishing a work that you had written, since you own the copyright for this without having it registered or not, you have all legal avenues available to redress your grievance. Publishing is another matter. That is, we are beginning a new e-only line of scholarly books (see www.thepress.purdue.edu). These books will be available digitally, will have ISBNs, will be published under our imprint, and will be available for distribution. I imagine that this is publication? No? Thomas Bacher, Director, Purdue Press 1207 SCC-E, W. Lafayette, IN 47907-1207 (765)494-2038 Fax: (765)496-2442 www.thepress.purdue.edu Be at your life-long-learning best. Read from a University Press. -Original Message- From: September 1998 American Scientist Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org]On Behalf Of Bernard Naylor Sent: Tuesday, November 07, 2000 10:58 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Self-Archiving and the reaction of publishers For the avoidance of any doubt (I hope!), let me make it clear. Writing something down on one piece of paper is not publishing it, in any sense. Stevan Harnad seems to be implying that because there is copyright in a statement, that means it is published. Not so. The concept of copyright can exist entirely independently of whether something is published and does so exist in many, many millions of instances. The extent and limits of copyright are different for something that is published, compared with the extent and limits of copyright for something that isn't. Bernard Naylor
Re: Central vs. Distributed Archives
On Tue, Nov 07, 2000 at 03:15:36PM +, Stevan Harnad wrote: So the answer is: Sure I'd have been happy to have CogPrints subsumed by arXiv if that had proved to be the way to get the entire refereed corpus online and free. But now it looks as if OAI-compliant distributed Eprint Archiving (including arXiv) will instead be subsumed into the global virtual Eprint Archive. I have learned not to claim that the arXiv is the Philosopher's Stone, much as I would like it to be. But if you're serious about merging with the arXiv, let's see how well OAI is doing in a year, as measured by the number of search queries at multiarchive OAS agents. -- /\ Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis) / \ \ / Visit the Math ArXiv Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/ \/ * All the math that's fit to e-print *
eprints and authentication
Can I seek information about a topic which might constitute a new thread? I have been concerned for a little while about how one goes about authenticating a document, lets say an eprint. Authenticating means, inter alia, two things a) Is the author authentic, and how can one check this b) Has the article changed since the author last did so? If so, by whom? I saw no mention of these aspects in http://www.eprints.org/software.html but perhaps this topic is discussed, and if it is I would welcome pointers (and apologize for this FAQ). Although a rather different kind of eprint, I now have on my computer some 30 Acrobat PDF files from various publishers which constitutes most of my published opus of the last four years or so. I downloaded them all via site licenses, and also as their author. I presume my holding them is not inappropriate! Curiously, none of these 30 Acrobat files seem to have much in the way of any authentication mechanism. In this case, it would be did this publisher really issue this Acrobat file, and has it been changed since they did so? (I presume to trust the publisher to authenticate the author(s) ). What I was expecting was perhaps a digital signature, which Acrobat distiller can easily insert into the whole document (based on so called X.509 certificates), but found none in the random selection of the 30 articles I looked in. Acrobat also has mechanisms to lock the article to prevent it from being modified. These mechanisms too did not seem to be used by any of my publishers. Which I found quite surprising, maybe even distressing. Dealing specifically with the eprint software, I note that most any type of document could be accepted as an eprint format. Some might be more suitable for authentication than others! I also note from the eprint site that 4.2.2 Validation /opt/eprints/site_lib/Validate.pm contains routines which are called by the core code to ensure that uploaded information is valid. I wonder what that could constitute? Does valid mean authenticity checks for X.509 certificates for example, as provided by the author submitting the document? I presume valid does not mean valid in the SGML sense? Although that too would be a jolly good idea. I concluded that authenticity is a rather neglected area. Any comments? -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (0)20 7594 5774 (Office) +44 (0)20 7594 5804 (Fax) Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7 2AY, UK. http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/
Re: Self-Archiving and the reaction of publishers
Yes; I think that this is publication. And I think that what happens when someone puts an article on an e-repository, whether refereed or not, is so similar to what you describe that it falls into the same category, if categories is what we are talking about. Bernard Naylor On Tue, 7 Nov 2000 10:54:25 -0500 Thomas Bacher bac...@purdue.edu wrote: Actually, copyright exists in the same force for items not published as for items published. The only difference really exists in the sense that sales can be hurt for commercially published materials. However, if someone violates your copyright by publishing a work that you had written, since you own the copyright for this without having it registered or not, you have all legal avenues available to redress your grievance. Publishing is another matter. That is, we are beginning a new e-only line of scholarly books (see www.thepress.purdue.edu). These books will be available digitally, will have ISBNs, will be published under our imprint, and will be available for distribution. I imagine that this is publication? No? Thomas Bacher, Director, Purdue Press 1207 SCC-E, W. Lafayette, IN 47907-1207 (765)494-2038 Fax: (765)496-2442 www.thepress.purdue.edu Be at your life-long-learning best. Read from a University Press. -Original Message- From: September 1998 American Scientist Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org]On Behalf Of Bernard Naylor Sent: Tuesday, November 07, 2000 10:58 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: Self-Archiving and the reaction of publishers For the avoidance of any doubt (I hope!), let me make it clear. Writing something down on one piece of paper is not publishing it, in any sense. Stevan Harnad seems to be implying that because there is copyright in a statement, that means it is published. Not so. The concept of copyright can exist entirely independently of whether something is published and does so exist in many, many millions of instances. The extent and limits of copyright are different for something that is published, compared with the extent and limits of copyright for something that isn't. Bernard Naylor -- Bernard Naylor Email: b...@soton.ac.uk University LibrarianTel: 023 8059 2677 University of Southampton Fax: 023 8059 5451 Highfield Southampton, SO17 1BJ
Re: Publishing quote
On Tue, 7 Nov 2000, Lynn C. Hattendorf Westney wrote: Thought I would share these words of wisdom with this listserv. You can publish the Journal of Left Earlobe Anatomy, and you can say it's free to the world, but if very few people come and look at it...then it doesn't make any difference. Robert D. Bovenschulte, ACS Publications, Division Director But if those very few people are the only researchers of Left Earlobe Anatomy then it makes all the difference in the world. Are you improving research (and hence science) or improving your impact? Tim Brody Computer Science, University of Southampton email: tdb...@soton.ac.uk Web: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~tdb198/
Exponential growth
Exponential and linear are examples of mathematical terms whose lay connotations have strayed somewhat from their rigorous meanings. Many people say exponentially when they really mean quickly, as in journal prices are rising exponentially. If journal prices rose by 0.5% per year (for the sake of argument, after adjusted for inflation), that would be exponential. But I assume that libraries would prefer that to seeing journal prices rise by 10 cents per page per year, even though that is linear. If the exponent varies over time, as it usually does in the real world, then exponentiation is only a point of view and not a predictive law. Any trajectory is exponential with a time-dependent exponent. Often a system described in exponential language actually follows a power law. One common reason is that the system expands first in the locales where it can expand quickly, and then later where it expands more slowly. For example, HIV/AIDS never spread in the United States with a constant exponent; I have heard that the curve of total infections was, at the beginning, closer to a cubic law. A more relevant example is new submissions per month to the arXiv, whose growth is strikingly close to linear: http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions It is also germane to call this a power law, because if new submissions grow linearly, total submissions grow quadratically. And I suspect the usual reason, because the first research areas in the arXiv were turbulent ones such as string theory and quantum computation. More sedate topics such as enumerative combinatorics and granular materials only came much later. I don't see why an alternative model, such as distributed interoperability, would be exempt from the general principle. Scientifically, then, I can't accept claims that a new standard or a new project for e-prints will grow exponentially. Mathematically such claims do not entirely imply the intended hype anyway. -- /\ Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis) / \ \ / Visit the Math ArXiv Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/ \/ * All the math that's fit to e-print *
