On Mon, 20 Aug 2001, Albert Henderson wrote:
> on Fri, 17 Aug 2001 Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > The 36% referred to the number of authors that updated their reference
> > at that time: this is another irrelevant statistic (for Albert's
> > purposes), about which the author, Tim Brody, has already posted a
> > response to this Forum.
> >
> > http://opcit.eprints.org/tdb198/opcit/
> > http://opcit.eprints.org/ijh198/
>
> Now that this source is clearly involved in a
> propaganda campaign where conclusions are so often
> unrelated to the facts, who would take it seriously?
>
Dear Albert,
I would hope my research to be taken seriously in the light that it is
given: research into arXiv's metadata, of which 36% has a
"journal-ref" tag associated (with a much larger percentage within the
HEP fields).
> From this I would conclude that arXiv is central to the physics HEP
research field, and is replacing on-paper research as the preferred
communication medium (although by no means is replacing peer-review).
Beyond this, I would argue, propaganda style, that archiving research
papers in publically accessible Internet archives would be very useful
to the wider scientific community, for all the reasons that Till has
argued.
The motives for releasing research for we researchers in the "have"
world have little to do with library funding and everything to do with
easier, more efficient, fairer access, for both the author and the
reader.
The presumed cost-savings (here I am being cynical) through the use of
Internet archives are a useful carrot to encourage the more useful
aspects of Internet archives.
I put again what I asked in a previous post: why are you (are
you?) against providing public, Internet based access to the primary
"give-away" literature?
--
Tim Brody
Computer Science, University of Southampton
email: tdb198_at_soton.ac.uk
Web: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~tdb198/
Received on Wed Jan 03 2001 - 19:17:43 GMT