'Superarchives' Could Hold All Scholarly Output. by JEFFREY R. YOUNG
Chronicle of Higher Education July 5 2002
http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i43/43a02901.htm
The above article contains some useful information, though it repeats
the usual confusion between self-publication and self-archiving:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.4
Read it, bearing in mind that:
(1) Author/institution self-archiving of peer-reviewed publications
is NOT the same as author/institution self-publication of
non-peer-reviewed papers: The author/institution does the
self-archiving, the refereed journals implement the peer review
(as always). Otherwise, it would simply be vanity-press
self-publication, and no 3rd-party quality-control standards to rely
upon.
(2) Preprints are papers before peer review and postprints are papers
after peer review. The "superarchives" (not a very useful term, "Eprint
Archives" is much better) are for self-archived eprints = preprints +
postprints.
(3) The also also repeats the usual confusion about the purpose of
self-archiving: Is it so researchers and their institutions can bypass
the impact barriers currently blocking access to their peer-reviewed
research output so as to maximize its impact, and thereby the research
revenues and other benefits that its impact generates? Or is it to so
researchers' institutions can take over the toll-gating of their research
output from the publishers, and derive revenue from charging for access
again? (Reply is left as an exercise for the reader.)
We will get there, sooner or later, and historians will duly record how
many times we got it wrong before we got it right...
Stevan Harnad
NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free
access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the
American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01):
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
or
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
Discussion can be posted to:
american-scientist-open-access-forum_at_amsci.org
See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative:
http://www.soros.org/openaccess
and the Free Online Scholarship Movement:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
Received on Mon Jul 01 2002 - 22:47:19 BST