On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, David Goodman wrote:
> I can testify personally to one of the strong disincentives, though it
> sounds trivial.
> I work in an old version of MS Word...
> The version I use does not automatically make pdfs...
> ...the pdfs produced this way do not have full functionality...
> I would as soon
> change my preferred word processing program as my browser or my email.
>
> Any commercial publisher will gladly take my .doc files and convert
> them. ArXiV and similar OAI programs will not. It is more important to
> me to write conveniently than to support a particularly inconvenient
> version of archiving. I'll contribute to OAI archives when they
> accommodate me. To the best of my knowledge, a great many people in the
> academic world feel the same.
This is indeed trivial, but I suspect that all of the kind of things
holding people back from self-archiving are equally trivial.
There is no need to generate PDF. All the Eprint archives require is
one text version, screen-readable and harvestable by full-text inverters.
Hence MS-Word-generated HTML or even ASCII (text-only) is sufficient. As
long as you archive one version like that, you can also archive the
MS Word document for those who can use it, and wish to.
Remember, self-archiving is a *supplement* to peer-reviewed journal
publication, not a *substitute* for it; it is intended to provide
immediate open access to your peer-reviewed research output ("vanilla
version") for those whose institutions cannot afford toll-access to
the official publisher's version, in order to maximize the impact of
your research:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.htm
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Received on Tue Jun 03 2003 - 20:46:15 BST