We have to distinguish (at least!) 9 milestones in sorting out the causal
threads that eventually came together to became OA:
(1) FTP: OA means free online access for all. A necessary (but not
sufficient) condition for this was the Internet, and, in particular,
anonymous FTP, and anonymous FTP sites. So what we are looking for is
the beginning of anonymous FTP. (It began with computer scientists,
I think at Bell Labs, and they soon started to use it to store and
provide access to both their software and their papers and tech reports.)
"E-mail was adapted for ARPANET by Ray Tomlinson of BBN in 1972. He
picked the _at_ symbol from the available symbols on his teletype to link
the username and address. The telnet protocol, enabling logging on
to a remote computer, was published as a Request for Comments (RFC)
in 1972. RFC's are a means of sharing developmental work throughout
community. The ftp protocol, enabling file transfers between Internet
sites, was published as an RFC in 1973, and from then on RFC's were
available electronically to anyone who had use of the ftp protocol."
http://www.walthowe.com/navnet/history.html
(2) HTTP: The next milestone after the Internet and anonymous FTP was
the invention of the Web, making it possible to provide OA via HTTP
rather than just FTP.
"In 1989 another significant event took place in making the nets
easier to use. Tim Berners-Lee and others at the European Laboratory
for Particle Physics, more popularly known as CERN, proposed a new
protocol for information distribution. This protocol, which became the
World Wide Web in 1991, was based on hypertext--a system of embedding
links in text to link to other text, which you have been using every
time you selected a text link while reading these pages. Although
started before gopher, it was slower to develop."
http://www.walthowe.com/navnet/history.html
(3) XXX: Particle Physicists, who already had a strong tradition of
sharing preprints of their articles in the paper era, made a natural
transition to doing this via email and then via the web, thanks to the
XXX repository (later Arxiv) software written by Paul Ginsparg in 1991.
"The first database, hep-th (for High Energy Physics -- Theory),
was started in August of '91 and was intended for usage by a small
subcommunity of less than 200 physicists, then working on a so-called
"matrix model" approach to studying string theory and two dimensional
gravity... Within a few months, the original hep-th had quickly
expanded in its scope to over 1000 users, and after a few years had
over 3800 users...These systems are entirely automated (including
submission process and indexing of titles/authors/abstracts), and
allow access via e-mail, anonymous ftp, and the WorldWideWeb."
http://people.ccmr.cornell.edu/~ginsparg/blurb/pg96unesco.html#history
(4) SUBVERSIVE PROPOSAL: In 1994 I (unsuccessfully) proposed immediately
generalizing the practice of self-archiving to all journal articles,
in all disciplines. I also (foolishly and prematurely, proposed OA
journal publishing).
http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/i-overture-the-subversive-proposal.shtml
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3809.html
(5) OAI-PMH: In 1999 came the "Santa Fe Convention," which eventually
became the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). OAI-PMH
was originally inspired in part by Arxiv and the goal of providing a
Universal Preprint Service (UPS), but it was soon generalized into an
interoperability protocol for all digital library contents, whether OA
or not.
http://www.openarchives.org/documents/FAQ.html
http://www.openarchives.org/news/ups1-press.htm
(6) EPRINTS: OAI-PMH did, however, usher in the era of distributed,
interoperable OA Institutional Repositories (IRs) (with EPrints being
the first and now widely used free software for creating IRs). The OA
IR era therefore also meant the end of the brief Central Repository (CR)
era, of which Arxiv and PubMed Central are still relics (as direct loci
of deposit).
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/10inbrief.html#HARNAD
http://iubio.bio.indiana.edu/bionet/mm/jrnlnote/2001-October/001512.html
(7) BOAI: The OA movement officially began with the Budapest Open Access
Initiative, launched in December 2001.
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/
(8) INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES: The OA way of the present and future
is for researchers to deposit their articles in their own Institutional
Repositories (IRs) and for any Central Repositories to harvest them via
the OAI-PMH:
http://roar.eprints.org/
(9) OA MANDATES: OA hence began with the first research self-archivers,
in the 70's and 80's, and came into its own with the Web and then the
OAI-PMH. The mandating of self-archiving by research institutions and
funders worldwide will complete this historic PostGutenberg transition
to the optimal and inevitable for research, researchers, and the public
that funds them:
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
Stevan Harnad
On Tue, 3 Jul 2007, Steve Hitchcock wrote:
> 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 - 15:28:42 BST