Stevan Harnad writes
> What is needed, urgently, today, is universal self-archiving, and
> not trivial worries about whether to do it here or there or both:
> OAI-interoperability makes this into a non-issue from the
> self-archiver's point of view, and merely a technical feature to
> sort out, from the OAI-developers' point of view.
Success here depends on selling the idea to academics, and that
depends crucially on what business models are followed.
> What Chris has in mind is only one, exceptional, special case,
> namely, the Physics ArXiv, a disciplinary archive (but the *only*
> one) which is, since 1991, well on the road to getting filled in
> certain subareas of physics (200,000+ papers) (although even this
> archive is still a decade from completeness at its present linear
> growth rate: http://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions see slide 10 of
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/tim-arch.htm )
There are other special cases. In fact each of the disciplines
that have traditionally issued preprints and working papers,
i.e. computer science, economomics, mathematics and physics
has its own special case. All have their own business model.
One size does not fit all.
> No need! First, because the "duplification of effort" is so minimal
It will not be, especially when there is a chance to have
different versions in different archives, this could be
rather, if not highly, problematic.
> It is such a small issue that it does not belong in a general discussion
> of open access and self-archiving for researchers.
You constantly belittle techncial problems, and then you wonder
why the archives are staying empty or do not exist. Answer: because
these "technical problems" have not been solved. By belittling
them, you put yourself in the way of finding a solution.
With greetings from Minsk, Belarus,
Thomas Krichel
http://openlib.org/home/krichel
RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Received on Tue Mar 18 2003 - 21:33:15 GMT