[GOAL] Re: G8 Science Ministers endorse open access
On Sun, 2013-06-16 at 16:15 -0400, Stevan Harnad wrote: [snip] In backing down on Gold (good), Finch/RCUK, nevertheless failed to provide any monitoring mechanism for ensuring compliance with Green (bad). It only monitors how Gold money is spent. Finch/RCUK also backed down on monitoring OA embargoes (which is bad, but not as bad as not monitoring and ensuring immediate deposit.) By Finch/RCUK do you mean the current RCUK guidance, because section 3.14 of: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/documents/RCUKOpenAccessPolicy.pdf Is all about monitoring for gold *and green* (including embargoes)? measure the impact of Open Access across the landscape including use of both immediate publishing (‘Gold’) and the use of repositories(‘Green’), and For articles which are not made immediately open access ... a statement of the length of the embargo period [will be required] I spent last Friday at a workshop of UK EPrints users that was all about how we're going to report open access compliance to RCUK. -- All the best, Tim signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Harnad Comments on Proposed HEFCE/REF Green Open Access Mandate
Hi Arthur, I don't understand how a link is more useful than a copy (although obviously having both is preferable)? Let us say that either a) an author imports a record from a publisher with link or b) pastes a link into the repository. Either way, that link tells us nothing about the state of the item on the publisher's web site (gold or green). As you say, you could hit a jump-off page, robots challenge or otherwise. In order to say for certain that the link given is as the metadata describes, and that the item is available under the correct license, someone will have to visit the publisher's site (from a public IP) and set a flag to say 'verified'. By comparison, taking a copy is little extra effort and the institution can say unambiguously that they have an open access copy. It also has the added benefit of guaranteeing long-term access to that work. After all, that is what libraries have been doing for hundreds of years with paper. -- All the best, Tim. On Wed, 2013-03-20 at 08:54 +1100, Arthur Sale wrote: Thanks Tim. No I don't think I missed the point. I agree that certification of all *repository* documents for REF (or in our case ERA) is the same, whether the source is from a subscription or an open access source. The point is that repository documents are divorced from the source, and are therefore suspect. Researchers are as human as everyone else, whether by error or fraud. However, Gold is slightly easier to certify (see next para), even leaving aside the probability that the institution may not subscribe to all (non-OA) journals or conference proceedings. One of the reasons I argue that the ARC policy of requiring a link to OA (aka Gold) journal articles (rather than taking a copy) is that one compliance step is removed. The link provides access to the VoR at its canonical source, and there can be no argument about that. Taking a copy inserts the necessity of verifying that the copy is in fact what it purports to be, and relying on the institution's certification. May I strongly urge that EPrints, if given a URL to an off-site journal article, at the very least *inserts* the URL (or other identifier) into a canonic source link piece of metadata, whether or not it bothers about making a copy (which function should be able to be suppressed by the repository administrator as a repository-wide option). One of the problems that the take-a-copy crowd ignore, is that the link to a Gold article might in fact not be direct to the actual VoR, but to a guardian cover page. This cover page might contain publisher advertising or licence information before the actual link, or it might require one to comply with free registration maybe even with a CAPTCHA. It may be protected with a robots.txt file. No matter, the article is still open access, even though repository software may not be able to access it. (Drawn to my attention by private correspondence from Petr Knoth.) Arthur Sale -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Tim Brody Sent: Tuesday, 19 March 2013 9:19 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Harnad Comments on Proposed HEFCE/REF Green Open Access Mandate Hi Arthur, I think you missed the point I was trying to make. The statement I was responding to was that gold includes everything you need to audit against (UK) funder compliance and the same can not be said for Green. I have no wish to debate the merits of gold vs. green, beyond pointing out that publisher-provided open access is no easier to audit than institution-provided open access. Indeed, if institutions are doing the reporting (as they will in the UK) an OA copy in the repository is easier to report on than a copy held only at the publisher. I don't know where Graham got the idea that gold will make auditing easier. Whether the publisher provides an OA copy or the author, all the points you make apply equally. -- All the best, Tim. On Tue, 2013-03-19 at 08:40 +1100, Arthur Sale wrote: Tim, you oversimplify the auditing of green. Try this instead, which is more realistic. For green, an institution needs to: 1) Require the author uploads a file. Timestamp the instant of upload. (1A) Check that the file gives a citation of a journal or conference published article, and that the author is indeed listed as a co-author. You might assume this, but not for auditing. EPrints can check this. (1B) Check that the refereeing policy of the journal or conference complies with the funder policy. This is absolutely essential. There are non-compliant examples of journals and conferences. More difficult to do with EPrints, but possible for most. (1C) Check that the file is a version (AM or VoR) of the cited published article. This requires as a bare minimum checking the author list and the title from the website metadata
[GOAL] Re: Harnad Comments on Proposed HEFCE/REF Green Open Access Mandate
Hi Arthur, I think you missed the point I was trying to make. The statement I was responding to was that gold includes everything you need to audit against (UK) funder compliance and the same can not be said for Green. I have no wish to debate the merits of gold vs. green, beyond pointing out that publisher-provided open access is no easier to audit than institution-provided open access. Indeed, if institutions are doing the reporting (as they will in the UK) an OA copy in the repository is easier to report on than a copy held only at the publisher. I don't know where Graham got the idea that gold will make auditing easier. Whether the publisher provides an OA copy or the author, all the points you make apply equally. -- All the best, Tim. On Tue, 2013-03-19 at 08:40 +1100, Arthur Sale wrote: Tim, you oversimplify the auditing of green. Try this instead, which is more realistic. For green, an institution needs to: 1) Require the author uploads a file. Timestamp the instant of upload. (1A) Check that the file gives a citation of a journal or conference published article, and that the author is indeed listed as a co-author. You might assume this, but not for auditing. EPrints can check this. (1B) Check that the refereeing policy of the journal or conference complies with the funder policy. This is absolutely essential. There are non-compliant examples of journals and conferences. More difficult to do with EPrints, but possible for most. (1C) Check that the file is a version (AM or VoR) of the cited published article. This requires as a bare minimum checking the author list and the title from the website metadata, but for rigorous compliance the institution needs to be able to download the VoR for comparison (ie have a subscription or equivalent database access). [In Australia we do spot checks, as adequate to minimize fraud. Somewhat like a police radar speed gun.] [Google Scholar does similar checks on pdfs it finds.] EPrints probably can't help. 2) Make it public after embargo. In other words enforce a compulsory upper limit on embargos, starting from the date of upload of uncertain provenance (see 3). EPrints can do this. 3) Depending on the importance of dates, check that the upload date of the file is no later than the publication date. The acceptance date is unknowable by the institution (usually printed on publication in the VoR, but not always), and then requires step 1C to determine after the event. Doubtful that EPrints can do this. 4) Require every potential author to certify that they have uploaded every REF-relevant publication they have produced. Outside EPrints responsibility, apart from producing lists on demand for certification. I just adapted this from your constraints on gold, and common Australian practice in the ERA and HERDC, which have long been audited. Arthur Sale -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Tim Brody Sent: Monday, 18 March 2013 8:45 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Harnad Comments on Proposed HEFCE/REF Green Open Access Mandate On Sat, 2013-03-16 at 08:05 -0400, Stevan Harnad wrote: On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 5:14 AM, Graham Triggs grahamtri...@gmail.com wrote: 2) By definition, everything that you require to audit Gold is open, baked into the publication process, and independent of who is being audited. The same can not be said for Green. RCUK and HEFCE will require institutions to report on, respectively, the APC fund and REF return. For gold, an institution needs to: 1) Determine whether the journal policy complies with the funder policy. 2) Run an internal financial process to budget for and pay out the APC. 3) Check whether the item was (i) published (ii) published under the correct license. 4) (For REF) take a copy of the published version. For green, an institution needs to: 1) Require the author uploads a version. 2) Make it public after embargo. So, actually I think green is easier to audit than gold. Even if it were as you say, it will still be the institution that is tasked with auditing. For most institutions that will be done through their repository (or cris-equivalent). It therefore follows that green (Do I have a public copy?) will be no more difficult than gold (Do I have a publisher CC-BY copy?). (Commercial interest - as EPrints we have built tools to make the REF return and are working on systems to audit gold and green for RCUK compliance.) -- All the best, Tim ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http
[GOAL] Re: Harnad Comments on Proposed HEFCE/REF Green Open Access Mandate
On Sat, 2013-03-16 at 08:05 -0400, Stevan Harnad wrote: On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 5:14 AM, Graham Triggs grahamtri...@gmail.com wrote: 2) By definition, everything that you require to audit Gold is open, baked into the publication process, and independent of who is being audited. The same can not be said for Green. RCUK and HEFCE will require institutions to report on, respectively, the APC fund and REF return. For gold, an institution needs to: 1) Determine whether the journal policy complies with the funder policy. 2) Run an internal financial process to budget for and pay out the APC. 3) Check whether the item was (i) published (ii) published under the correct license. 4) (For REF) take a copy of the published version. For green, an institution needs to: 1) Require the author uploads a version. 2) Make it public after embargo. So, actually I think green is easier to audit than gold. Even if it were as you say, it will still be the institution that is tasked with auditing. For most institutions that will be done through their repository (or cris-equivalent). It therefore follows that green (Do I have a public copy?) will be no more difficult than gold (Do I have a publisher CC-BY copy?). (Commercial interest - as EPrints we have built tools to make the REF return and are working on systems to audit gold and green for RCUK compliance.) -- All the best, Tim signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Wikipedia founder to help in [UK] government's research scheme
On Wed, 2012-05-02 at 19:00 +0900, Andrew A. Adams wrote: The [UK] government has drafted in the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to help make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain available online to anyone who wants to read or use it. I was hoping that the new government might be less star-struck than the previous one. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose, it would seem. We really don't need Jimmy Wales advising on this. The team behind eprints has been (with minimal funding) developing the technology needed for many years and there are many academics in the UK much better versed in the intricacies of UK academic work and life than Mr Wales. Sigh. I foresee another lost couple of years wasted on this instead of getting to grips with the known problem and the known solution (including providing better funding for eprints development to the team that created it and still does the software engineering for it). Thanks for the kudos. This article did take me to the UK.gov working group: http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/wg-expand-access/ Unfortunately they seem to have a focus on big deal licensing (!) and author-pays economics. I haven't heard anything from their institutional repository sub-group, although there are a lot of layers between me and them ... hopefully IRs - a solution to access - won't get drowned out by licensing/author-pays reform - a solution to library budget constraints - in their report. In terms of the UK Gateway to Research I expect that is the political equivalent to data.gov.uk. It doesn't make much sense to have national gateways as a research tool and anyway in implementation I can't see much chance of a one solution to rule them all working. In all likelihood we will continue as we are - institutional based EPrints/DSpaces/etc. that are harvested into a central tool for tracking mandate compliance and value for money for UK spending. (This is already in the pipeline with the RCUK ROS system - most likely using something like CERIF to share data within and between institutions, funders, and the UK and EU governments) -- Tim Brody School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton Southampton SO17 1BJ United Kingdom Email: t...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 [ Part 1.2, This is a digitally signed message part ] [ Application/PGP-SIGNATURE (Name: signature.asc) 501 bytes. ] [ Unable to print this part. ] [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: RCUK Open Access Feedback
On Sun, 2012-03-18 at 21:28 +0900, Andrew A. Adams wrote: David Prosser wrote: Say I wanted to data mine 10,000 articles. I'm at a university, but I am c= o-funded by a pharmaceutical company and there is a possibility that the re= search that I'm doing may result in a new drug discovery, which that compan= y will want to take to market. The 10,000 articles are all 'open access', = but they are under CC-BY-NC-SA licenses. What mechanism is there by which = I can contact all 10,000 authors and gain permission for my research? The intent of CC-NC is that one cannot take the original material, re-mix it (or even just as-is) and sell the resulting new work. It does not mean that the information it contains cannot be used in a commercial setting, but that the expression it contains cannot be used in a commercial setting. A simple example is that a CC-NC licensed book cannot be recorded as an audio play which is then sold. If one makes an audio book it must be available for free. However, copies of a CC-NC book can be distributed to students who are paying for a course in English literature as one of the books studied. I don't understand this concern about 'NC' (non-commercial). I understood that the give-away open access literature was given-away by authors precisely because the motivation for publishing publicly funded research is not for direct commercial gain. Instead, authors derive impact from others reading and citing their work. If a company were to create and sell an audio version of a research work then that increases the author's impact. That doesn't preclude someone else creating a for-free audio version, nor readers accessing the original self-archived or gold-OA text version. OA is not about anti-capitalism - if someone can take the resource (OA research literature), add value and re-sell it (with suitable attribution) then that can only be to the advantage of authors and readers. -- Tim Brody School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton Southampton SO17 1BJ United Kingdom Email: tdb2 at ecs.soton.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 -- next part -- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 490 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120319/5d1bd3a8/attachment.bin
[GOAL] Re: RCUK Open Access Feedback
On Sun, 2012-03-18 at 21:28 +0900, Andrew A. Adams wrote: David Prosser wrote: Say I wanted to data mine 10,000 articles. I'm at a university, but I am c= o-funded by a pharmaceutical company and there is a possibility that the re= search that I'm doing may result in a new drug discovery, which that compan= y will want to take to market. The 10,000 articles are all 'open access', = but they are under CC-BY-NC-SA licenses. What mechanism is there by which = I can contact all 10,000 authors and gain permission for my research? The intent of CC-NC is that one cannot take the original material, re-mix it (or even just as-is) and sell the resulting new work. It does not mean that the information it contains cannot be used in a commercial setting, but that the expression it contains cannot be used in a commercial setting. A simple example is that a CC-NC licensed book cannot be recorded as an audio play which is then sold. If one makes an audio book it must be available for free. However, copies of a CC-NC book can be distributed to students who are paying for a course in English literature as one of the books studied. I don't understand this concern about 'NC' (non-commercial). I understood that the give-away open access literature was given-away by authors precisely because the motivation for publishing publicly funded research is not for direct commercial gain. Instead, authors derive impact from others reading and citing their work. If a company were to create and sell an audio version of a research work then that increases the author's impact. That doesn't preclude someone else creating a for-free audio version, nor readers accessing the original self-archived or gold-OA text version. OA is not about anti-capitalism - if someone can take the resource (OA research literature), add value and re-sell it (with suitable attribution) then that can only be to the advantage of authors and readers. -- Tim Brody School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton Southampton SO17 1BJ United Kingdom Email: t...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 [ Part 1.2, This is a digitally signed message part ] [ Application/PGP-SIGNATURE (Name: signature.asc) 501 bytes. ] [ Unable to print this part. ] [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: OA Archives: Full-texts vs. metadata-only and other digital objects
Tim Gray wrote:
Stevan
Thank you for your full and illuminating reply to my query about how much
material in OA archives is available as full text. I am surprised at how
low you estimate the figure to be and that it is not, yet, possible to
produce a definitive number.
Knowing the difference between a full-text (also whether it's
scholarly/published/peer-reviewed) is something in the realm of Google
Scholar, Citeseer etc.
Without wishing to recreate one of those services I don't know of a
method for producing a definitive number. I suspect simple approaches
(e.g. does record have PDF link) will be undermined by (sorry for
picking on you!) sites like:
http://library.isibang.ac.in:8080/dspace/
No prizes for spotting why that wouldn't work :-)
I am wondering if the Open DOAR (Directory of Oopen Access Repositories -
the 'sister project' to the Directory of Open Access Journals, DOAJ) will
set strictly 'full text only' rules for inclusion in its directory? And how
will it relate to the archives.eprints directory you are involved with? It
gets confusing to me because there are so many lists of repositories around
on the web. How does the celestial harvesting list you mention relate to
the archives.eprints list (are they the same list?) or the large list kept
by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) at
http://gita.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/?
Celestial is an OAI cache - it retrieves every metadata record from
those archives I've added to it. To make archives.eprints (IAR) I
stapled together the GNU EPrints listing with Celestial's record counts
(as an aside, anyone can use the records graphs from Celestial). I keep
a firmer technical control of Celestial than I do the IAR.
UIUC is the point of entry to get added to OAIster, but provides
analyses of all *OAI* repositories registered with it. The IAR includes
many archives with no or broken OAI interfaces, as well as aggregates
(e.g. single entry with multiple OAI interfaces). We also collect
additional metadata in the IAR that isn't exposed by OAI (type,
software, etc.). (Not forgetting the registry at www.openarchives.org
Hussein Suleman's OAI explorer)
My hope and expectation is that OpenDOAR will include some metric of
full-textness. There was also an effort for the recent Amsterdam
SURF/JISC/CNI meeting to ascertain some figures (by survey) for the
content of IRs - I believe that report will be published in the next
month or so.
I take the archives.eprints to be the closest to a definitive list of the
OA Institutional Repositories which we are concerned with here - alhtough I
notice that our 'DSpace@Cambridge' repository
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/dspace/index.htm is not included.
Here?
http://archives.eprints.org/index.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dspace.cam.ac.uk%2F
I see the distinction between OA Archives and the Open Access Initiative.
Maybe this is not strictly relevant to this forum and a basic
misunderstanding of the purposes of archiving, but I still cannot
understand why people are archiving *just* the metadata and not the full
text. It makes OA search engines like OAIster more like a any other
standard bibliographic database with mostly subscription-only access.
I'm glad to see you're an archivangilist rather than a repologist
('sorry, the full-text isn't available here')!
It's the IR vs Open archives paradigm. The IR serves an institutional
need to *track* as well as to *expose* research output. Tracking
research output does not require making that research available for-free
on the Web. The purpose of Open archives is to make research more
efficient by maximising access to research, hence maximising research
impact.
If a high quality body of freely accessible literature is available
through IR's, then the services that build on them will be more useful.
There are a lot of records appearing out there, but the full-texts
available from ad hoc Web pages still dwarfs IRs. There is also no clear
distinction between prestigious research and the capture all
philosophy - administrators and authors need to realise that what they
put into the IR may very well turn up on automated CVs, and they
probably don't want to have their high-impact peer-reviewed articles
hidden amongst 1000's of powerpoint slides!
Sincerely,
Tim Brody tdb...@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Administrator, Institutional Archives Registry
http://archives.eprints.org/
Re: BBC cites a preprint from arXiv
Eric F. Van de Velde wrote: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4564477.stm Is this a first? I.e., a major news organization uses unrefereed self-archived preprint as the basis of a news story. Although not a major hard-news story, it was posted on the main page of the BBC news web site. Does this point to the growing acceptance of Open Archives and/or of arXiv? Does it point to a growing disregard for peer review (at least, outside of the academy)? There's this previous occasion (New Scientist, but citing arXiv 'publication'): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4357613.stm The paper in question is http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0504003. I would cynically suggest the story has more to do with promoting Doctor Who than it does a breakthrough in theoretical wormhole physics (or peer review). All the best, Tim.
Re: Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding
Brian Simboli wrote: (Worries that people will merely use OAIster or google to bring up all the articles for a given issue can be circumvented if the journal title is suppressed in the metadata for the freely available article.) This wouldn't help citation linking, which is already pretty patchy. Anyway, I think you'll find autonomous services already get around missing metadata through triangulation! Interestingly, aren't the physics societies right now partially committed to something like a de facto subscription overlay model, in that many physics peer-reviewed postprints are being archived on arxiv.org and are therefore freely accessible? Why shouldn't the physics socieities then just directly link to the postprints at arxiv.org, obviating the need for authors to engage in duplicative, afterglow self-archiving efforts? Or is it the case that, if only a portion of articles published by the physics societies have self-archived counterparts on arxiv, the tipping point has not been reached yet where it becomes not in their economic interest to allow access to a free copy (via author self-archiving)? I believe that some physics societies will accept *submissions* from a pre-print server, but it's not the case that the publisher version gets pushed back onto an e-print server (unless the author has permission and does that himself, which I haven't noticed). Searching for referee in arXiv finds only ~1000 matches, referee or corrected only 37,000. So, perhaps: 1) Physicists don't need to make corrections (so only the pre-print is arXived) 2) Only the post-refereed version gets archived 3) Physicists don't provide a comment when they do update to reflect referee's comments See also Alma Swan's presentation http://www.eprints.org/jan2005/ppts/swan.ppt). All the best, Tim. Alma Swan wrote: In recent days there has been some discussion as to whether NIH's retreat may in fact be due to a fear of adverse effects on the scholarly publishing industry if immediate self-archiving were to be mandated by NIH for its grantholders (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/02-02-05.htm). And, certainly, the Nature Publishing Group appears to be changing its policy on self-archiving. It is not easy to follow NPG's arguments so far because they are rather complicated, but it appears to be suggesting that it is aiding Open Access by moving from allowing immediate self-archiving by authors in their institutional repositories to allowing it only after a period of six months post-publication of an article. The logic of this is not at all clear. It would be very helpful if NPG would clearly explain the causal inferences and its policy but one has to infer that NPG has apprehensions about a possible adverse effect of self-archiving upon its business. Many publishers, particularly some learned societies, share these apprehensions and that is perfectly understandable if they base their view of the future on imaginings rather than on actual evidence. In the case of self-archiving, there is absolutely no need for this sort of self-terrorising. The experiment has been done and the results are clear-cut. Fourteen years ago the arXiv was set up (www.arxiv.org). It houses preprints and postprints in physics, predominantly in the areas of high-energy physics, condensed matter physics and astrophysics. It is the norm for researchers in these areas to post their articles either before or after refereeing to this repository. In 2003, the 421 physics journals listed in ISI's SCI published a total of 116,723 articles. The arXiv receives approximately 42,000 articles per annum, meaning that around a third of all physics research articles appear not only in journals but ALSO in the arXiv. Have physics publishers gone to the wall in the last 14 years? No, and not only have they continued to survive, they have also continued to thrive. I have recently asked questions about this of two of the big learned society publishers in physics, the American Physical Society in the US and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd in the UK. There are two salient points to note: 1. Neither can identify any loss of subscriptions to the journals that they publish as a result of the arXiv. 2. Subscription attrition, where it is occurring, is the same in the areas that match the coverage of the arXiv as it is across any other areas of physics that these societies publish in. Both societies, moreover, see actual benefits for their publishing operations arising from the existence of arXiv. The APS has cooperated closely with arXiv including establishing a mirror (jointly with Brookhaven National Laboratory)... We also revised our copyright statement to be explicitly in favor of author self-archiving. These efforts strengthened (rather than weakened) Physical Review D [an APS journal that covers high-energy physics] ...I would say it is likely we maintained subscriptions to Physical Review D that we may otherwise have lost if we hadn't been so
Re: Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving
Regarding the article in the UK's Guardian newspaper: Open access jeopardises academic publishers, Reed chief warns Richard Wray, Wednesday June 30, 2004 http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/books/story/0,10595,1250591,00.html At the end: Reed has, however, made some concessions towards the open access movement... Alongside the rise of open access publishers, such as BioMed Central and PLoS, some academics are pushing for the right to place copies of articles they write for subscription journals on their own websites. Reed has changed its copyright rules to allow self-archiving in this way. Tim Brody Southampton University http://citebase.eprints.org/
Re: Scientometric OAI Search Engines
The likelihood is the user searched Google before they tried Pubmed or ScienceDirect: Ingelfinger Over-Ruled harnad comes up with an OA version as the top match. With OAI and OpenURL the OA version could be linked in as easily as the aggregators currently linked to by PubMed (although perhaps not as reliably, but then if you get a hit at least you know the version is accessible). While it would be nice for services to link to OA versions, it doesn't take more than 30 seconds to copy/paste some appropriate keywords into Google, which seems to do a good job of discovering an accessible version. Tim Brody Citebase Search: http://citebase.eprints.org/
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
[2 Postings: (1) L. Waaijers; (2) T. Brody] (1) Leo Waaijers (SURF, Netherlands) Stevan Harnad wrote: By the way, the real OAI google is OAIster, and it contains over 3 million pearls from nearly 300 institutions http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ but many are not journal articles (and even if they all were, that still wouldn't be nearly enough yet!): http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0023.gif And -- as of March 10 -- Yahoo searches OAIster! See http://www.umich.edu/~urecord/0304/Mar08_04/07.shtml Leo Waaijers (2) Tim Brody (ECS, Southampton): Henk Ellermann, Google Searches Repositories: So What Does Google Search For?, http://eepi.ubib.eur.nl/iliit/archives/000479.html But it is not only the quantity. Even when documents are available it does not mean that they are available to everyone. And if it's available to anyone, you still can't be sure that the system is running... What we badly need is a continuous and authoritative review of existing Institutional Repositories. The criteria to judge the repositories would have to include: * number of documents, (with breakdown per document type) * percentage of freely accessible documents * up-time It is great that Google becomes part of the Institutional Repositories effort, but we should learn to give fair and honest [data] about what we have to offer. There is actually not that much at the moment. We can only hope that what Google will expose is more than just the message amateurs at work. I would agree with Henk that the current -- early -- state of 'Institutional Repositories' (aka Eprint Archives) is not yet the promised land of open access to research material. Institutional research archives (and hence the services built on them) will succeed or fail depending on whether there is the drive within the institution to enhance its visibility and impact by mandating that its author-employees deposit all their refereed-research output. Then, once it achieves critical mass, the archive can support itself as part of the culture of the institution. The archive is the public record of the best the institution has done. So those archives that Henk refers to, with their patchy, minimal contents, need to look at what is going into this public record of their research output, and must decide whether it reflects the institution's achievements. As a technical aside, DP9 was developed for exposing OAI things to Web crawlers some time ago: http://arc.cs.odu.edu:8080/dp9/about.jsp I would be surprised if Google were to base any long-term service on only an archive's contents. Without the linking structure of the Web a search engine is left with only keyword-frequency techniques, which the Web has shown fails to scale to very large data sets. For my money, Google-over-Citebase/Citeseer-over-Institutional Archives is much more interesting (the Archive gives editorial management, Citebase/Citeseer the linking structure, and Google the search wizardry). Stevan Harnad: Eprints, for example, has over 120 archives worldwide of exactly the same kind, with over 40,000 papers in them: http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=analysis I have revised the description on that page to say that a *record* is not necessarily a full-text. And of course a full-text is not necessarily a peer-reviewed postprint. It would help bean-counters like myself if repository/archive administrators would tag in an obvious place what their content types are (i.e. what type of material is in the system), and how the number of metadata records corresponds to publicly accessible full-texts. Tim Brody Southampton University http://citebase.eprints.org/
Re: OAI compliant personal pages
Jim Till wrote: On Tue, 10 Feb 2004, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote [in part]: [j-cg] the growing number of open access repositories [j-cg] including OAI compliant personal pages I noted with interest Jean-Claude's comment about OAI compliant personal pages. How can such pages be identified as OAI compliant (and, how can their number be estimated)? I don't know what J-CG means. Individuals can of course set up an OAI repository, which is just a collection of metadata records. If it's OAI-compliant it could be registered with Open Archives Initiative - Repository Explorer http://oai.dlib.vt.edu/cgi-bin/Explorer/oai2.0/testoai There isn't a 'discovery' method as such for OAI -- we have searched for GNU EPrints sites by using a Web search for terms that are common across installations. http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php Regards, Tim Brody
Re: Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations
On Mon, 17 Nov 2003, Troy McClure wrote: ive been browsing through the citebase and quite a few of such messages came up: This paper has been withdrawn by the authors due to copyright. http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?id=oai%3AarXiv%2Eorg%3Anlin%2F0301018 Stevan Harnad: I have to admit that this is the first I've ever heard of any papers being removed from Arxiv for copyright reasons. I will ask Tim Brody (creator of citebase) to see whether there is a more sensitive way to do a count, but using copyright and (remove or withdraw) I found 6 papers out of the total quarter million since 1991. There are only 13 deleted (flagged as such by arXiv's OAI interface) papers in arXiv.org, or 0.005%. One of those papers is available as an earlier version: http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?id=oai%3AarXiv%2Eorg%3Anlin%2F0301018 (go to arXiv, click v1, get full-text) Tim Brody
Re: Berlin Declaration on Open Access
- Original Message - From: Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk The Berlin Declaration is just the beginning of a series of steps that the signatories will be taking to promote open access. Among these steps, the Max-Planck Society is Edoc, an open-access repository of all of the research output of the Max-Planck Institutes' many research laboratories. This is a truly remarkable concerted act of institutional self-archiving, and a superb example for the research world at large. http://edoc.mpg.de I had trouble finding any full-text, open-access research articles (literature that would otherwise be inaccessible without a subscription) in edoc? All the best, Tim.
Re: Nature's vs. Science's Embargo Policy
There are two sides to the first world/developing world research divide: access to the First world by the Developing world (FD), and access to the Developing world by the First world (DF). An APC model solves the FD problem - as an author is paying the publisher to provide maximum dissemination through free-access, therefore (assuming the reader has access to the Web!) any researcher can access the paper regardless of their financial situation. The DF problem is more to do with journal-impact language barriers rather than the economics of the situation. In theory developing-world researchers - given the current system - are on an equal footing with any other world researcher. Arthur Smith (hope I'm not quoting out of context) has said in this list that the first world is currently subsidising the developing, as it is paying the vast majority of the costs (through subscriptions etc.), while the developing world pays very little of this but has the same potential to be published in the high-impact journals. No sustainable economic model can allow the developing world to have both free access AND be able to publish in those first-world, high-impact journals for free - not without being subsidised by the first world. That said, free (open) access *will* allow developing-world journals to play on a level playing field with the first. Once the literature is free-access, aggregating services can index both first-world and developing-world journals - and provide impact factors for both. All the best, Tim Brody - Original Message - From: ept e...@biostrat.demon.co.uk To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2003 3:43 PM Subject: Re: Nature's vs. Science's Embargo Policy Alan Story wrote: Jan: Further on the question of open access by potential authors. A few questions re: BioMed Central waivers ( of the $500 article-processing charge): . EPT is watching these discussions and trying to work out the impact of open access on developing country science. My understanding is that both the BMC $500 charge and the PloS $1500 charge are to cover the costs both of document conversion and peer review and I am not sure what % of these figures is for peer review. I do not understand why peer review costs are considered to be so high, since the reviewers give their professional skills for free and the other costs are merely mailing and record keeping. The whole process can now be automated, as has been done by the Canadian journal, Conservation Ecology (www.consecol.org). See also www.arl.org/sparc/ for other tools for automated peer reviewing. Once such tools are set up, peer review costs must be almost nil. For developing country scientific organisations, replacing one unaffordable cost (tolls) by another unaffordable cost (APC) is of little encouragement. Even though the APC costs are substantially less, and may be eliminated for developing country authors (if they can 'make a reasonable case', and see the query from Alan Storey), one must hope that these efforts are interim means of getting from 'here' to 'there'. To ensure the international scientific community has access to ALL research ouput, there must be a true level playing field. Only then can the 'missing' research generated in the developing world, and critical for international programmes (in AIDS/malaria/tuberculosis/environmental protection/biodiversity/taxonomy/ biosafety/biopolicy) become part of mainstream knowledge. Only then can the isolation of the scientific community in under-resourced countries be overcome and international partnerships be established to the benefit of all of us. Carry out a search for 'malaria' on the non-profit distributor of many developing country journals, Bioline International, to see an example of the missing research. Use www.bioline.org.br and search from the homepage across all material on the system. My understanding has always been that the open access movement aimed to provide free access to institutional archives - free of costs both to the author and the reader. Any costs to be met would be borne by institutions, which have an interest in distributing their own research output in ways that make the greatest impact. Again, my understanding is that costs for setting up an institutional eprint server would be: an initial modest setting-up cost, some hand-holding costs for authors in preparing documents for the eprints servers, followed by low maintainenance costs. These could surely be 'absorbed' by most organisations. Essential peer review costs would be readily paid for by savings plus automation. And that sounds just fine for science in the developing world. Barbara Kirsop Electronic Publishing Trust for Development - www.epublishingtrust.org
Re: Draft Policy for Self-Archiving University Research Output
If the author's employment contract states that their employer (the University) reserves non-commercial distribution rights then that author can not sign away those rights to a publisher (without the agreement of the University). In my opinion I would rather the IPR were held by the institution - who paid for the research, facilities support - rather than with the publisher. If not for any other reason than an institution will rarely hold the same kind of monopoly as the big publishers. All the best, Tim. - Original Message - From: Fytton Rowland j.f.rowl...@lboro.ac.uk To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 3:52 PM Subject: Re: Draft Policy for Self-Archiving University Research Output Um - before you can have a postprint you must have published the paper somewhere. In many (most?) cases you will have transferred the copyright to the journal. So how can the University then assert its ownership of a copyright that you, the individual academic, have already given away in the belief that it was yours to give? Fytton Rowland. - Original Message - From: Picciotto, Sol s.piccio...@lancaster.ac.uk To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 1:57 PM Subject: Re: Draft Policy for Self-Archiving University Research Output It seems that copyright ownership could be an important obstacle to archiving postprints. I have proposed at Lancaster that academic staff employment contracts be modified to make it clear that the university asserts its rights as employer to copyright in staff research publications, but only to the extent of reserving the right to authorise non-commercial publication on the internet, e.g. in an eprints archive. This would circumvent a possible restriction resulting from any copyright assignment the author signs. The idea has been met favourably here, both by the AUT (professional association) and management, but both have referred it for discussion at national level. I think the university should be willing to forego any claim to income from research publications, but should retain the right to authorise non-commercial publication. The decision on when to publish, which version, etc, should be left to the author(s), within a policy such as that suggested here for Southampton, which would greatly facilitate acceptance of eprints archiving as a standard practice. cheers Sol Prof. Sol Picciotto Head, Lancaster University Law School Lancaster University LANCASTER LA1 4YN, U.K. direct phone (44)(0)1524-592464 fax (44)(0)1524-525212 s.piccio...@lancaster.ac.uk ** -Original Message- From: Stevan Harnad [SMTP:har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk] Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 12:49 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Draft Policy for Self-Archiving University Research Output Comments are invited on the following draft for a university policy on the self-archiving of research output: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/archpol.html It is being formulated both for use at Southampton University, and as a possible model for wider adoption, particularly in connection with a recommended restructuring http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2373.html of UK's Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) http://www.rareview.ac.uk/ and its emulation in other countries http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2356.html Stevan Harnad
Re: Online Self-Archiving: Distinguishing the Optimal from the Optional
- Original Message - From: Arthur P. Smith apsm...@aps.org The main focus of your tragic loss article was the obsolescence of paper, and the resulting consequences. One consequence which was perhaps not widely anticipated is expanded access to research journal content - now available from the desktop instead of having to go to the library. And the increased availability that consortium deals and other special arrangements are providing. So the library as a physical facility is less useful, but as a provider of information, surely the utility of every library has grown over the past 8 years? Are the other things you mention (phone, fax, email, etc.) really a substitute for traditional scholarly communication? The SPARC paper (http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html) identified four features of scholarly publishing: registration, certification, awareness, and preservation. Given the growth of e-journals, consortia agreements, and aggregators (or, in the case of the big publishers, simply a single publisher's holdings), what role does the institutional library - and it's librarians - have in the future of scholarly publishing? Is the future of the research library a web page of user names and passwords, along with a form for request-a-journal? (... if the research literature was Open Access, perhaps even this would be supplanted by a single Google-search?) All the best, Tim.
Re: UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) review
Chris Zielinski asks: how many articles have been read but not cited? The folloowing estimates are from Citebase's database (http://citebase.eprints.org/) - (but duly noting caveats on data-quality, scope, coverage, noisiness, potential for abuse etc, http://citebase.eprints.org/help/coverage.php http://citebase.eprints.org/help/#impactwarning ) Looking at the 91,017 arXiv.org articles that have a journal reference (the author has said where the article was/will be published) 17628 (19.4%) have not been cited but have at least once been downloaded from uk.arXiv.org (of the remainder 73265 have both been cited and downloaded, 98 have been cited but not downloaded, and 26 were neither cited or downloaded) I believe this is because physicists read all the new additions to the arXiv.org, as it forms a convenient inbox of research. However, over time downloads are more discerning between low impact and high impact (pink line is the top quartile of papers by citation impact): http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/hitslatencybyquartile.png Correlation r between hits and citation impact for the top quartile is 0.3359 with an n of 25,532. Citations and downloads are mutually re-inforcing. If an author has read an article they are more likely to cite it, conversely if an author sees a citation they are likely to read the article that has been cited. All the best, Tim. - Original Message - From: informa...@supanet.com To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2002 7:39 AM In fact, Stevan mentions other new online scientometric measures such as online usage [hits], time-series analyses, co-citation analyses and full-text-based semantic co-analyses, all placed in a weighted multiple regression equation instead of just a univariate correlation. Indeed, impact factors are very crude quasi-scientometric and subjective measures compared even with such simple information (easy to obtain for online media) as counts of usage - for example, how many articles have been read but not cited? All these are indeed worth pursuing and, I would have thought, right on the agenda of the OA movement. Chris Zielinski Director, Information Waystations and Staging Posts Network Currently External Relations Officer, HTP/WHO Avenue Appia, CH-1211, Geneva, Switzerland Tel: 004122-7914435 Mobile: 0044797-10-45354 e-mail: zielins...@who.int and informa...@supanet.com web site: http://www.iwsp.org
Re: Book on future of STM publishers
I presume Albert Henderson's's assertion that student work is of lesser value is based on personal opinion rather than on any scientometric study of the relative impact of different types of research. I believe the majority of the members of research groups consist of research students (PhDs); hence the novel work that research students undertake forms the bedrock from which research in general is developed (not only through the students carrying their own work on into research posts and professorships, but also as it feeds directly into the student's research group and the research community in general). It would seem, therefore, that research dissertations may be a potentially valuable resource after all - one that for too long has been accessible only from library archives. All the best, Tim Brody (PhD Research Student) - Original Message - From: Albert Henderson chess...@compuserve.com To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2002 9:09 PM Subject: Re: Book on future of STM publishers The fundamental flaw in Stevan's position is that it discounts the receipt of value -- recognition and targeted dissemination -- exchanged by the journal author. If one recognizes that the journal publisher does provide such value, the journal author is on the same footing as the book author. No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money, as Samuel Johnson observed. Steven's position is out of bounds. The question is moot. In the case of the dissertation, the acceptance is of a lesser value, since it is student work. Most books derived from dissertations require a good deal of additional work before they are publishable in the usual sense and recognizable by the world beyond dissertation examiners. The future of STM publishing is a great topic for magazines that have a short shelf life. They can attract a curious readership and sell lots of advertising by puzzling over questions without answers. I for one have serious doubts whether the future of any industry niche would be a fit subject for a student dissertation. Most predictive visions offered decades ago by experts are today only meaningful as evidence of lobbying and other promotional efforts. Book or dissertation, I would expect to shelve this topic near astrology. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com . .
Re: Chat: E-Archives Challenge: Results
On Mon, 28 May 2001, Wentz, Reinhard wrote: Since issuing the challenge I have thought of a definite limitation of e-archiving: The list of references in e-archived articles will never look as beautiful as the ones produced by publishers' professional proof readers, copy editors and other valuable members of a publishing team. I can send a sample (in colour!) of such a list to anybody doubting that statement and also some pictures of what professional copy editors (what a splendid body of people!) are up to in their spare time. *cough* Do I get 10 quid if I point out you're completely wrong? e-archiving will require authors to provide reference lists in standard formats (or a format that can be heuristically extracted). Thus, using e-archives, your reference lists will look as elegant as you wish because the format will no longer be determined by author, journal or field, but by the person viewing them! (and the reason for this is that author's citations won't be shown unless they produce good quality metadata and references that can be automatically linked) Of course, this does not negate the old axiom rubbish in, rubbish out, but whatever goes in, it will look very beautiful on the way out. All the best, Tim Brody
Re: Digitometrics
On Thu, 24 May 2001, Tim Brody wrote (about my proposed 2nd criterion for evaluation of an eprint archive, which was: 2) its suitability for yielding citation data [an 'impact-ranking' criterion?]): [tb] One might also add the facility to export hit data, as an [tb] alternative criterion (or any other raw statistical data?). What kind of raw statistical data might be most useful, in the future, for 'impact-ranking'? Perhaps the beginning of the answer lies in what can be measured, then what can be measured accurately, and lastly what is useful to users. The first part is (in no particular order): hits, citations, authors, institutions, countries, dates, and sizes, ...? At the arXiv archive, one section of the FAQ section (under Miscellaneous) addresses the question: Why don't you release statistics about paper retrieval?. (See: http://xxx.lanl.gov/help/faq/statfaq). The short answer provided is: Such 'statistics' are difficult to assess for a variety of reasons. The longer answer also includes the comments that: [*snip* accentuates faddishness] And, [*snip* big brother is watching] Thought-provoking comments? I would say there are better reasons than the two you chose, some of which mentioned by arXiv. For example, no system administrator would appreciate someone downloading a paper 1000 times just to up their hits! Also, as pointed out by arXiv, knowing how little one's research is read or cited could put a researcher off arXiving all together. (I provide an example of such statistics from cite-base, but leave it to the user to decide whether they are useful or not) All the best, Tim Brody
Re: Validation of posted archives
On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, Guillermo Julio Padron Gonzalez wrote: The name of a journal is part of the validation of a published paper. We all use the rigorousness of the peer review and the editorial crite-ria of the journals to judge about the validity of a published paper. I agree that there can be exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions. It is clear that nobody has the time or the willingness to dive into each paper to find out whether it is the final version of a validated paper or it is just electronic garbage. The fact is that a non-administered archiving system may cause a proliferation of non-validated, duplicated, misleading and even fraudulent information in the web and there will be no way to identify the valid information, so the readers will go to validating sites, v. g. the publisher site. Unless OAI included some kind of validation... I hope you do not mind me adding to this discussion. If I may clear up perhaps a confusion about the protocol OAI: OAI is a protocol for the distribution of Metadata, much the same as TCP/IP is a protocol used by the Internet to distribute information. I would no more expect OAI to provide me with guarantees about the content than I would TCP/IP about this email. (As an aside, OAI does not provide any facility for the distribution of full-text papers (it can merely distribute 'pointers' to papers).) Therefore the validation, or otherwise, of papers and their heritage rests with the application(s) that use OAI. As an example of an Open Archive that has had ample opportunity to be filled with rubbish; (correct me if I am quoting wrong), arXiv has, in its ten years, only had to delete 2 papers out of 160,000. This would suggest that either arXiv has a very efficient staff or this is not really a problem (or, as I suspect, both). Your suggestion, to me, does seem a rational one (and indeed currently exists between arXiv and the APS - I believe the APS will accept submissions using arXiv papers), that there are archives of pre-print papers which are then picked up by validating services (i.e publishers) which then repackage archives into validated subject/editorial content. It would then be your choice as to whether you use the e-Print server or the packaged (and pay-for) service of Publishers, and naturally the effect of the publisher service would be to improve the e-Print content (... invisible hand of peer review). All the best, Tim Brody.
Re: Number of pre-prints relative to journal literature?
On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, Stevan Harnad wrote: [ Origin of statistics about the coverage of scientific literature by XXX ] Here's one way to estimate it for the physics arXiv: percentage of current citations by papers in within arXiv not papers not within arXiv (courtesy of Les Carr, Zhuoan Jiao, Tim Brody Ian Hickmen): http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/Tim/sld003.htm There are two questions: 1) What percentage of the _current_ output of literature is being arXived? 2) When looking for cited work, what percentage could I find in the arXiv? 1) For High Energy Physics (for which statistics covering all published work can be obtained from SPIRES), the percentage of papers arXived is almost 100%. I have no data to cover other areas, but it must be noted that most areas of XXX are seeing increased depositing, whereas HEP is almost static. I would hypothesise that this is because other areas do not have a high percentage of all literature being archived. 2) For the whole of the archive this is around 30-40% (with the HEPs having a larger percent), with the result that it will be another 10 years before all cited work has been archived (assuming the typical lifespan of a paper is 5-7 years). This length of time could be reduced by authors archiving existing literature. All the best, Tim Brody
Re: Central vs. Distributed Archives
Greg: As a rule, it is better for web sites to share the same archive than to each have fragments. It is better for Oxford and Cambridge to each have all of Shakespeare's plays than for Oxford to have only the comedies and Cambridge to have only the tragedies. That is why I favor shared interoperability, which is in some ways centralized, to fragmented interoperability, which is optimistically called decentralized. Massive redundancy is one of the few strengths of the existing paper-based system; Stevan: I am not an expert on digital storage, coding or preservation, but I am not at all sure that Greg is technically right above (and I'm certain that the Oxford/Cambridge hard-copy analogy is fallacious). I would like to hear from specialists in localized vs. distributed digital coding, redundancy, etc. -- bearing in mind that in the case of the If I may separate the political issues from the technical. Political: There is a fear that a decentralised system will result in no overall responsibility for archive continuity. But, equally, a centralised body can decide that a system is no longer useful or is too expensive to be free - what happens if XXX goes pay-per-view? What rights do mirrors have to store XXX if they are told to remove their archive? Technical: The fear is that there will be only one copy of a paper stored in an institution department or library and if that archive is lost that paper disappears into digital oblivion. Data storage is very cheap - there is little difference between storing 1 or 100 copies. Oxford and Cambridge could farm all world physics archives and store their contents. This is not currently done because Open Archives include pay-per-view archives, where only the abstract can be farmed - and hence there is no provision for farming of texts. I may also point out that there are already archives that perform distributed mirroring - math arXiv is primarily made up of papers that have been archived elsewhere (judging by the lack of associated meta data and updates). Tim Brody Computer Science, University of Southampton email: tdb...@soton.ac.uk Web: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~tdb198/
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/
Re: Why hep-th has 40% red-links
(Note: Red-links = citations to LANL pre-print reference number, e.g. hep-th/9906001, may or may not also contain published data) Tim: http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-53/iss-8/p35.html Some of my colleagues in Santa Barbara--the string theorists, for example, and several of my coworkers in condensed matter theory as well--insist that they don't need The Physical Review. For research purposes, they don't need refereed print journals at all. They are producing remarkable results this way, so I take them very seriously. What they are doing is using the Los Alamos e-print archive for all of their research communications. They check it every day for new information. They post all their papers there, cite references by archive number, use the search engine to find other papers, and need little or no other publication services. I don't know whether string theory is hep-th, but it would look like a credible explanation why hep-th has such high hits for red-links, compared to hep-ph (which is a area of similar size and lineage). Perhaps this is a rule that can be extended to all theoretical science - that theory does not demand the same level of invisible hand rigour as more practical research. Stevan: Elite string theorists are a small, specialized group. Their numbers and stature are about comparable with the scale of all of science in the 17th/18th century, where the few practitioners world-wide (Newton, Leibniz, etc.) at any time could communicate their research by simply writing letters to one another. This is neither representative of research as a whole today, nor will it scale (in my opinion). hep-th has 6000 authors, hep-ph has 7500 authors, with 13000 and 17000 papers respectively. The difference in the number of red-links identified is respectively 40% and 20%. This represents a large and active group within LANL, although, as you say, the quoted article only relates to a small group this could be representative of the larger hep-th physicists who'se overall behaviour results in double the number of red-link citations. What other explanation(s) could there be for for a large difference in citation patterns? [cue argumentative as opposed to empirical] This behaviour does not need to scale, hep-th and hep-ph have been virtually static in the number of deposits since 1995 (growth has come from other areas), and the citation patterns have been relatively static since 1998. Although these red-link citations could also be citing published articles, it would appear to be the settled behaviour of 40% of citations being to LANL pre-prints, surely this must be a change away from citations in the peer-review world to citations in the e-print, pre-print world? Stevan: Remember Simon-says: We should definitely find out (but not necessarily believe) what people SAY they are doing, and why. We should also find out what they DO do, and what others do/say too. Then let's piece together the picture objectively. The string theorists are definitely a piece of the whole picture, but equally definitely not a representative microcosm of it! hep-th and hep-ph are the most self-contained and long-standing areas of LANL, the behaviour of HEP authors may not represent medics or computer scientists but they may show the relative effect that instantly available, unrefereed articles could have on the research world. Stevan: [Nor is theory in general the dividing line, I think, for there are more and less populated, more and less elite areas of theory too -- in my (Stevan-says) opinion...] But (feel free to correct me), hep-th is the primary digital source for theoretical physicists, and that is where theoretical physics research is being done. Tim Brody Computer Science, University of Southampton email: tdb...@soton.ac.uk Web: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~tdb198/
