Date: Fri, 01 Sep 1995 10:17:45 +0100
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
Subject: Conference Paper Archive

Below is an advertisement which I've allowed to appear in the
Psycoloquy Newsletter, because it represents one possible direction
that electronic publication could take.

I must point out in advance, however, that there are features of this
proposal that may not be optimal, and that the Net might serve authors
far better with a different structure. The ad below is for a
password-protected, subscription-based electronic archive for
conference papers (called The "Online Journal of Psychology Conference
Presentations," OJPCP). For a subscription fee of $75 per year, readers
will be able to access the conference papers that are in the archive.

The promise is that OJPCP will only contain papers that have somehow
been "vetted," but how, and at what level, and how consistently, is not
indicated. Authors may "republish" their papers, but only if they indicate
that they have previously appeared in OJPCP. There is some ambiguity
about whether authors too, must pay submission charges, or only if they
submit in paper.

It is true that there is a need for electronic access to conference
papers. Conference proceedings often contain only the abstracts, and
are in any case not readily accessible in paper. But the OJPCP service
has made some assumptions about the way that that need should be
fulfilled on the Net, and those assumptions need to be considered
criticallly:

(1) Does the (uneven) level of "vetting" of papers presented at various
conferences make them "journal articles"? Or are they still what they are:
conference papers?

(2) Is this a service to readers or to authors? Will (and should)
readers want to pay $75 per year for access to an undefined sample of
conference papers? Will (and should) authors take the trouble to submit
their conference papers to OJPCP in exchange for that paid readership
(how big is it likely to be?) and at the risk that, in exchange, this prior
"publication" may prevent a refereed journal from considering the paper?
(Most refereed journals have a policy of not publishing papers that have
been published previously.)

(3) What are the true expenses of such a paper archive? How was $75 per
subscriber selected? Are there author charges too, or only for paper
submission? Would the service to authors not be more substantial if (a)
the true costs of processing and archiving were born by the authors
themselves, in the form of page charges? and then (b) the papers were
made fully accessible, to the entire Net, for free, without the barrier
of a subscription price and password? and (c) the "paper" could then be
considered an electronic preprint, which need not be regarded as a
prior publication, jeopardizing its eligibility for consideration by a
refereed journal?

Following the advertisement I have appended a list of references to my
own papers on these questions and those of Andrew Odlyzko and Paul
Ginsparg (all accessible electronically, and for free...). Paul
Ginsparg is already extending his revolutionary Physics Electronic
Preprint Archive to include Conference Proceedings, but not on a
subscription model.

    Stevan Harnad, Editor
    PSYCOLOQUY (sci.psychology.journals.psycoloquy)
    Sponsored by the American Psychological Association

    Department of Psychology
    University of Southampton
    Highfield, Southampton
    SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM

    psyc@pucc.princeton.edu
    phone: +44 1703 594-583
    fax:   +44 1703 593-281
--------------------------------------------------------------------
    http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psyc
    http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html
    gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals
    ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy
    ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy
    news:sci.psychology.journals.psycoloquy

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 31 Aug 1995 20:32:14 GMT
From: batkinso@fox.nstn.ca (Bob Atkinson)
To: sci-psychology-journals-psycoloquy@uunet.uu.net
Newsgroups: sci.psychology.journals.psycoloquy
Subject: ONLINE JOURNAL FOR PSYCH CONFERENCE POSTERS
Organization: Nova Scotia Technology Network

The Online Journal of Psychology Conference Presentations (OJPCP)

Online Academic Research Incorporated, a Canadian electronic publishing
company, announced plans today to publish a series of Internet-based
academic and research journals,starting with the Online Journal of
Psychology Conference Presentations, to appear in February, 1995 on the
worldwide web (WWW). Here is some preliminary information on the Journal:

Background

As no permanent forum exists for the publishing of Psychology conference
posters, presentations, papers, symposia and invited addresses, access to
those materials is difficult after the conference has concluded. This
journal will provide easy, economical and long-term access to these
materials, allowing other researchers and practitioners to more easily
find, review and cite presentations in this important body of work. The
journal will publish posters and other conference presentations (papers,
symposia and invited addresses) in the field of Psychology in an online
format.

Only those presentations which have been vetted by academic and
professional associations and presented at conferences, meetings and
conventions will be accepted. Conference material published in OJPCP may
be published in another journal as long as that journal publication makes
it clear that the data was presented previously at the conference and in
OJPCP.

The Journal will be a password-protected site on the World Wide Web of the
Internet, which may be accessed without long-distance charges by
subscribers worldwide using NetScape, Mosaic or other HTML browsing
software on a Mac, PC or UNIX system with Internet access at 14.4KBAUD or
faster. Subscription rates start at $75 US per year.

The home page of the Journal will offer a monthly table of contents, with
a link button on each entry leading to its abstract, and a button there
leading to the actual presentation itself for viewing online. You can
search through the presentations online by author, title, date,
conference, overall topic and keywords. You can also capture any graphics
directly in NetScape and/or download the full text of the actual
presentation (in text format) to your computer for later reading offline.

We anticipate several thousand presentations will be published in the
first year alone. While the site will maintain all posters submitted
online, we will also publish an annual CD edition (PC and Mac format) of
all presentations, to be sold separately.

Anticipated first on-line issue due: February 1996

Technical Requirements:

Text for presentations should ideally be on a 3.52 floppy disk (Mac or
PC), saved in a recent version of WordPerfect, MS Word or just as a plain
ASCII text file. Graphics should also be on 3.52 Mac or PC floppy disk,
saved in any of these formats: EPS, TIFF (no higher than 150 dpi), PICT,
GIF, CGM, WMF or Lotus PIC.

If your presentation exists on paper only and not on disk, send us a clean
copy of all the pages, numbered properly. We will scan in the pages and
format them, but there will be a small additional formatting fee, based on
the complexity of the job. We will inform you on the amount when we
receive the paper materials.

Standard submission and formatting fee: $95 US.
Turnaround time: 30 days.

For more information, contact:

Bob Atkinson, Systems Manager at:
The Online Journal of Psychology Conference Presentations
5525 Artillery Lane Halifax  Nova Scotia  Canada  B3J 1J2
Phone: (902) 425-5137  Fax: (902) 425-5135  EMail: batkinso@fox.nstn.ca

------------------------------------------------------------

The following papers are retrievable by World Wide Web from:

http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/intpub.html
or
http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/intpub.html

By ftp from:

ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Harnad
cogsci.soton.ac.uk/ftp/pub/harnad/Harnad

Or by gopher from:

gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals

Ginsparg, P. (1994) First Steps Towards Electronic Research
Communication. Computers in Physics. (August, American Institute of
Physics).  8(4): 390-396.  http://xxx.lanl.gov/blurb/

Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum
of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in
Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991).

Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the
Means of Production of Knowledge. Public-Access Computer Systems Review
2 (1): 39 - 53 (also reprinted in PACS Annual Review Volume 2
1992; and in R. D. Mason (ed.) Computer Conferencing: The Last Word. Beach
Holme Publishers, 1992; and in: M. Strangelove & D. Kovacs: Directory of
Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists (A.
Okerson, ed), 2nd edition. Washington, DC, Association of Research
Libraries, Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing, 1992); and
in Hungarian translation in REPLIKA 1994.

Harnad, S. (1992) Interactive Publication: Extending the
American Physical Society's Discipline-Specific Model for Electronic
Publishing. Serials Review, Special Issue on Economics Models for
Electronic Publishing, pp. 58 - 61.

Harnad, S. (1995) Electronic Scholarly Publication: Quo Vadis?
Serials Review 21(1) 70-72 (Reprinted in Managing Information
2(3) 1995)

Harnad, S. (1995) Implementing Peer Review on the Net:
Scientific Quality Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals. In:
Peek, R. & Newby, G. (Eds.) Electronic Publishing Confronts Academia:
The Agenda for the Year 2000. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Harnad, S. (1995) The PostGutenberg Galaxy: How To Get There From Here.
Times Higher Education Supplement. Multimedia. P. vi. May 12 1995

Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and
Scholarship:  A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell
(Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for
Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research
Libraries, June 1995.

Odlyzko, A.M. (1995) Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending
demise of traditional scholarly journals, International Journal of
Human-Computer Studies (formerly International Journal of Man-Machine
Studies), 42 (1995), 71-122. Condensed version in Notices of the
Amercan Mathematical Society, 42 (Jan. 1995),  49-53.  Available at URL
ftp://netlib.att.com/netlib/att/math/odlyzko/tragic.loss.Z