David Goodman wrote:
> Surely If someone makes a document public and publicly accessible on
> an archive, then it is the responsibility of any organization claiming
> to be an "archive" to archive it. By permitting removal at all you are
> saying that it is necessary for some other organization to take the
> responsibility of archiving your archive so the record remains available.
"Responsibility" is the key issue, to me, too often glossed over
(along with the associated "context"). The maintainers of an e-print
archive generally make no claims to responsibility for the content; it is
entirely with the author. For a journal, peer review to a certain standard
transfers responsibility to the publisher, and no author expects to be
able to delete a paper after publication through that means. Review papers
and abstracting/indexing services take responsibility to another level
- any citation makes the citing author responsible for the connection
and for placing the work in its scientific context. Responsibility for
placing a work within the wider world rests with journalists, text book
authors, historians, and the like. Responsibility for long-term archiving
of the original content has long been a collaboration between publishers
and libraries; that seems to be continuing electronically with slightly
different roles.
Some thoughts from a few years ago on this:
http://ridge.aps.org/APSMITH/ALPSP/talk.html
See also:
http://www.catchword.com/alpsp/09531513/v13n1/contp1-1.htm
for the published content, and context provided by ALPSP...
Arthur
Received on Wed Jun 11 2003 - 15:57:18 BST