Comments invited. Full text is at:
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/citation.html
International Digital Libraries Research Programme
INTEGRATING AND NAVIGATING EPRINT ARCHIVES
THROUGH CITATION-LINKING
U.S. Partners:
Paul Ginsparg (Los Alamos National Laboratory) Joe Halpern (Cornell)
Carl Lagoze (Cornell)
U.K. Partners:
Stevan Harnad (Southampton) Wendy Hall (Southampton) Les Carr
(Southampton)
Associated Organizations:
Association of Computer Machinery (ACM)
British Computer Society (BCS)
PROJECT SUMMARY
The Los Alamos Eprint Archive <
http://xxx.lanl.gov> (LANL) is a
remarkable public repository for a substantial and growing proportion
of the current research literature in Physics. It is rapidly becoming
the primary way that the world physics community is accessing its
literature. At this time, not only does there exist a very natural
means of making this rich resource much more powerful and useful for
its current physicist users (at least 35,000 worldwide daily), but its
capabilities stand ready to be extended and universalized, so as to be
able to render the same service for all the rest of the disciplines,
whether within the LANL Archive itself, or in other archives designed
along the same lines.
The key to this enhancement of LANL's present functionality and its
extension to the rest of science and scholarship, is citation-linking.
The World Wide Web is predicated on hypertext connections between
documents, but for the scientific/scholarly world the scholarly link
par excellence is formal citation of one paper by another. This is the
way researchers have naturally been interconnecting their writings all
along, but until know it has only been possible to follow those
connections off-line, piece-wise, mediated by a great deal of real
footwork in between. Now the entire corpus can be navigated via citations
on-line.
Commercial journal publishers, along with secondary
indexing/abstracting services, are exploring ways of interconnecting
the on-line journal literature, but those initiatives are intrinsically
and severely limited by the fact that that literature is criss-crossed
with financial firewalls that prevent free navigation via full texts
and their citations until and unless the access fees for each full text
"hit" is first paid through subscription, site-license or pay-per-view.
(To allow the full texts to be browsed for free would be equivalent to
giving away the literature for free in the on-line medium.)
The Los Alamos Archive does not have this constraint; hence the
citation linking can be done almost immediately, yielding seamless public
access worldwide to the entire corpus. The present project accordingly
brings to bear the prior expertise and experience of the Open Journal
and CogPrints team at Southampton UK, who have successfully developed
(on a much smaller but interdisciplinary database) the citation linking
tools that can now be applied and further developed to completely
intralink LANL. To benefit from the citation linking, both the User and
the Author interfaces to LANL have to be redesigned so as to adapt them
to this advanced form of navigation and to universalize them for all
disciplines. It is the Cornell team, with their track record of success
in solving the associated interoperability and metadata problems with
NCSTRL and CoRR who will be applying their expertise and experience
here. And of course the unique success of the LANL team in having designed
the Archive and its robust software, rendering it the indispensable
resource it is, makes it the critical core partner in this collaboration
(although LANL, already supported by NSF, is not requesting any funding).
LANL is in many ways a microcosm for the future direction of the research
literature on the Web as a whole. The project is also being undertaken in
association with the Association of Computing Machinery in the US and
the British Computer Society in the UK.
It is hoped that this project, if successful, will both focus and
accelerate progress in a direction that will be beneficial to the world
scholarly/scientific community.
Full text:
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/citation.html
Comments would be welcome
Received on Wed Feb 10 1999 - 19:17:43 GMT