The particle physics community had a tradition of open access long before Paul Ginsparg's arXiv was set up. Indeed, it was set up and worked because of the tradition of circulating paper preprints at the same time as one's paper was submitted for publication. Paul just offered to save us all the postage. This tradition was in place when I was a particle physics grad student in 1967 ...
Tony Hey
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2007 4:16 PM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: when did the Open Access movement "officially" begin
On Tue, 26 Jun 2007, Peter Suber wrote:
> if you want to identify the influential events...
> ...there are many more as well, including many earlier ones, such
> as Paul Ginsparg's launch of arXiv in 1991 and Stevan Harnad's
> self-archiving proposal in 1994.
I'd put it even earlier than that. Computer scientists were making
their papers Open Access in the 1980's on their anonymous-FTP sites
and then their websites (once the web was invented). Citeseer started
harvesting papers in 1997, but you can still find computer science
papers on it that were self-archived in the 1980's.
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/
These early self-archivers had the good sense not to worry about naming it;
they just went ahead and did it...
Stevan Harnad
Received on Wed Jun 27 2007 - 19:32:12 BST