On Wed, 27 Jun 2007, Tony Hey wrote:
> 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 is quite right that the tradition of sharing pre-publication
preprints among particle physicists started much earlier. He is also
spot-on in pointing out that all that the Internet, and email, and the
Web, and Arxiv provided was a much more powerful and efficient way of
doing what they were doing already. BUT: (1) Sharing paper preprints is
not Open Access. It is just sharing paper preprints.
(2) Although other disciplines did not have the tradition of
sharing unrefereed preprints, most did have the tradition of sending
postpublication reprints to all reprint requesters (but that too is
not OA).
(3) Open Access is free online access (to peer-reviewed postprints)
for one and all, webwide.
(4) OA only became possible with the online era (FTP sites and then
websites).
Charles Bailey is right to point out that the very first OA journals
began in the late 1980s. But I think OA self-archiving by computer
scientists started even earlier, probably at Bell labs and DARPA. After
all, as computer science was the discipline that invented the Internet
(though physicist Tim Berners-Lee then went on to invent the Web)...
Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/
UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
a suitable one exists.
http://www.doaj.org/
AND
in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
in your own institutional repository.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://archives.eprints.org/
http://openaccess.eprints.org/
Received on Wed Jun 27 2007 - 23:29:44 BST