Re: ClinMed NetPrints

From: Jim Till <till_at_UHNRES.UTORONTO.CA>
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 10:31:58 -0400

On Wed, 23 May 2001, Stevan Harnad wrote:

[sh]> What two criteria? Certainly the archives should be interoperable
[sh]> (that's what www.openarchives.org is about, and what www.eprints.org
[sh]> software is for), and certainly the citation-linking and
[sh]> impact-ranking should be across all the distributed corpus, just as
[sh]> the harvesting is. But apart from that, the only other criteria
[sh]> (apart from topic) are "unrefereed/refereed" and, for the latter,
[sh]> the journal brand-name (just as before).

My two suggested criteria for evaluating an eprint archive (or, if you
prefer, please regard them instead as 'design & usability guidelines' for
an eprint archive) are:

1) its suitability as part of an (envisioned) universal archive
[an 'inter-operability' criterion?], and,

2) its suitability for yielding citation data
[an 'impact-ranking' criterion?].

I understand that Stevan is suggesting a third:

3) its suitability for distinguishing between reports that either have, or
have not, been peer-reviewed and/or published in a 'brand-name' journal
(either before, or after, being included in the eprint archive)
[a 'sign-posting' criterion?].

Now, I'll ask a less theoretical question: To what extent do existing
eprint archives conform to guidelines such as these? In the set of
existing eprint archives, I'll include not only the arXiv archive and the
CogPrints archive, but also (for example) BMJ's ClinMed NetPrints archive
and Elsevier's Chemistry Preprint Server (CPS) archive.

Other comments on these 'criteria' (or, 'guidelines') would be welcomed
(if the 'Re: e-Archiving Challenge' thread hasn't diverted attention away
from this one!).

Jim Till
University of Toronto
Received on Wed Jan 03 2001 - 19:17:43 GMT