Stevan refers to the possibility that computer scientists might have
been making papers freely available over networks prior to arXiv and
the first free e-journals. This is possible, but documentation is
hard to find. One would also have to question the degree of
accessibility, given the limitations of networks at the time.
So there may have been availability but search and discovery was an
issue. One of the first attempts to solve this that I am familiar
with in computer science is the The Unified Computer Science
Technical Report Index
(
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/ucstri/paper/paper.html). This simply
says: "*In recent years*, this informal network has moved onto the
Internet, as many departments, research groups, and other
institutions make publications such as technical reports, preprints,
and theses freely available electronically."
This paper refers to the Computer Science Technical Reports Archive
Sites (now listed at
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/techreport-sites/list/)
but it is hard to date these archives from this information. There
may well be some there that began pre-1991.
Another source of clues might have been papers by Paul Ginsparg about
the origins of arXiv, but on this I wrote in my thesis
(
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/8233/)
"It is harder to determine the origins of the model on which the
working implementation of arXiv was based, perhaps unsurprisingly
since the system was simply described by Ginsparg as written in 'a
few summer afternoons'. Papers about arXiv give few clues in this
respect, but comments given to the New York Times (Overbye 2001)
point to Cornell physicist David Mermin as a contemporary influence."
Overbye, An Online Archive With Mountain Roots
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=technology&res=9806EFDB1F31F93BA1575BC0A9679C8B63&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fOrganizations%2fL%2fLos%20Alamos%20National%20Laboratory
The Mermin reference is: Mermin, N. D., 1991, Publishing in
Computopia. Physics Today
but no OA version. In any case, if I recall, this was more about
principle than practice.
So it looks like we have the earliest documented 'OA' services as:
archive: arXiv (1991)
journal: New Horizons in Adult Education (1987)
http://education.fiu.edu/newhorizons/
Both are open to earlier offers.
Steve
At 20:24 27/06/2007, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>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 Tue Jul 03 2007 - 13:38:05 BST