Steve Hitchcock writes
> Paul Ginsparg defined an eprint as "something self-archived by the author".
> Isn't that the clearest distinction, and an obvious one for this forum to
> draw?
I tend to think of an eprint as a "public-access scientific document
in electronic form". The insistance on "author self-archiving" obscures
the fact that there are many eprints that are not archived by the
author but by an agent of the author, for example an academic institution
or a scholarly society.
The problem with self-archiving by authors is the growing tendency
of authors to deposit their papers in homepages. It is debatable
if this sort of activity is real "archiving". What we need is to
have more agents, acting on behalf of authors that will hopefully
make more long-term archiving possible. The archiving through
an agent is what I call "formal" archiving, and I oppose it to
the tendency of "informal" archiving in homepages. My impression
is that formal archiving is relatively declining, whereas informal
archiving is on the increase. I see the OAi as an attempt of formal
archivers to regain initiative.
Thomas Krichel
http://openlib.org/home/krichel
RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
offline 2000-06-04 to 2000-06-11
Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT