Mark Doyle notes
> I don't think the econ one was kept current at all and it was never brougt
> back under the central server.
It is still operates, and it is still the one archive that will
give your papers the largest exposure. But you can repeat that
to authors as many times as you want, they still don't want to upload
there.
> I had thought that one reason that things weren't catching
> on in economics was that publishers had more restrictive policies about
> preprint circulation, but maybe I am misinformed.
One thing that has happened is that an individual author wants
to open a personal archive only for her reprints, because a clause in
most copyright transfer agreements allows for reprint in "collection
that only contain the authors work.
> Are all servers high-availibility servers?
I am not sure what you mean by that, but presumably the answer is no,
i.e. not all are.
> Are they run by a grad student who will move on at some point leaving
> it to languish?
Some are. Others are run by central banks or economics think tanks.
These are larger archives that we expect to be quite stable.
> Do they keep abreast with the latest technical developments and migrate
> to new formats as needed?
Yes.
> There is no 'subsuming',
I borrowed that term from Stevan's post.
> I don't think you should write off the advantages of having a scalable
> centralized (but mirrored) repository.
I am not doing that at all. All I am writing is that a centralised
approach may not be suitable for all commuities. Certainly when we think
of extending free electronic documents from preprint
disciplines to non-preprint disciplines, from TeX based collections to
"wordprocessor babylon" collections, from uncontested to contested knowledge
it may not be optimal to consider xxx as the only possible model.
Cheers,
Thomas Krichel mailto:T.Krichel_at_surrey.ac.uk
http://gretel.econ.surrey.ac.uk
Received on Tue Aug 25 1998 - 19:17:43 BST