Re: PostGutenberg Copyrights and Wrongs for Give-Away Research

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 15:04:08 +0100

On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Thomas J. Walker wrote:

> sh >[I might add only that the distinction between "personal web home page"
> sh >and "e-print servers" is silly, incoherent, and hence untenable, but it
> sh >makes no difference, if it makes some people happy to put it that way...]
>
> There is distinction that to many authors may be important:
>
> E-print servers that are well stocked are a somewhat more convenient place
> to look for particular articles compared to hunting down the authors' home
> pages and looking there. Of greater consequence, researchers who are not
> looking for articles by the authors in question may find articles by them
> on that well-stocked e-print server, like them, and use them.

Quite right, and this is one of the principal rationales for the Open
Archives Initiative (OAI) http://www.openarchives.org and Eprints
archive-creating software http://www.eprints.org

OAI provides a tagging standard that makes all registered OAI-compliant
Archives interoperable, hence harvestable across archives
http://oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu/Register/BrowseSites.pl
so you need not know the URL of the paper or the
author.

You just search them like one big virtual archive in a centralized
index: See http://cite-base.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search
and http://arc.cs.odu.edu/

But the home-page/public distinction is moot, since authors can run
their own eprints servers too, and register them as OAI-compliant!
http://rocky.dlib.vt.edu/~oai/cgi-bin/Explorer/oai1.0/testoai

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Received on Wed Jan 03 2001 - 19:17:43 GMT

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