Re: Nature's vs. Science's Embargo Policy

From: <J.F.Rowland_at_lboro.ac.uk>
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2003 00:46:59 +0100

Quoting Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>:

> On Fri, 26 Sep 2003, Iva Melinscak Zlodi wrote:
>
> > But, there is a large difference between self-archiving on personal
> web
> > sites (we can not expect all personal archives to be OAI-compliant)
> > and self-archiving on institutional or public servers. Possibilities
> > for finding and retrieving articles from personal web sites are
> greatly
> > reduced.
>
> The answer is very simple, and very decisive: The distinction between
> a "personal website" and an "institutional website" is completely
> empty, hence untenable. Researchers' websites, provided for them at
> their institutions, are simply a disk sector.

I think there is a significant difference in practice, if not in law,
between a University's general-purpose website (which might well contain a
personal page about each faculty member) and an OAI-compliant e-prints
server which the University had set up specifically for providing access to
its members' publications. Publications mounted on the latter would be
more accessible to searchers than ones mounted on the former. While we are
rightly concerned primarily with making the scholarly literature available
on the WWW free of charge, we cannot ignore the question (actually the
classical librarian/information scientist's question!) of how people are
going to find the items they want amongst the enormous mass that is there.

Fytotn Rowland, Loughborough University, UK, and temporarily Victoria
University of Wellington, NZ.
Received on Sun Sep 28 2003 - 00:46:59 BST