Citation-Linking the Los Alamos Physics Eprint Archive (Stevan Harnad) Stephen Clark 14 Jun 1999 12:28 UTC
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 18:27:16 +0100 From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@COGLIT.ECS.SOTON.AC.UK> Subject: Citation-Linking the Los Alamos Physics Eprint Archive Comments invited. Full text is at: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/citation.html International Digital Libraries Research Programme INTEGRATING AND NAVIGATING EPRINT ARCHIVES THROUGH CITATION-LINKING U.S. Partners: Paul Ginsparg (Los Alamos National Laboratory) Joe Halpern (Cornell) Carl Lagoze (Cornell) U.K. Partners: Stevan Harnad (Southampton) Wendy Hall (Southampton) Les Carr (Southampton) Associated Organizations: Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) British Computer Society (BCS) PROJECT SUMMARY The Los Alamos Eprint Archive <http://xxx.lanl.gov> (LANL) is a remarkable public repository for a substantial and growing proportion of the current research literature in Physics. It is rapidly becoming the primary way that the world physics community is accessing its literature. At this time, not only does there exist a very natural means of making this rich resource much more powerful and useful for its current physicist users (at least 35,000 worldwide daily), but its capabilities stand ready to be extended and universalized, so as to be able to render the same service for all the rest of the disciplines, whether within the LANL Archive itself, or in other archives designed along the same lines. The key to this enhancement of LANL's present functionality and its extension to the rest of science and scholarship, is citation-linking. The World Wide Web is predicated on hypertext connections between documents, but for the scientific/scholarly world the scholarly link par excellence is formal citation of one paper by another. This is the way researchers have naturally been interconnecting their writings all along, but until know it has only been possible to follow those connections off-line, piece-wise, mediated by a great deal of real footwork in between. Now the entire corpus can be navigated via citations on-line. Commercial journal publishers, along with secondary indexing/abstracting services, are exploring ways of interconnecting the on-line journal literature, but those initiatives are intrinsically and severely limited by the fact that that literature is criss-crossed with financial firewalls that prevent free navigation via full texts and their citations until and unless the access fees for each full text "hit" is first paid through subscription, site-license or pay-per-view. (To allow the full texts to be browsed for free would be equivalent to giving away the literature for free in the on-line medium.) The Los Alamos Archive does not have this constraint; hence the citation linking can be done almost immediately, yielding seamless public access worldwide to the entire corpus. The present project accordingly brings to bear the prior expertise and experience of the Open Journal and CogPrints team at Southampton UK, who have successfully developed (on a much smaller but interdisciplinary database) the citation linking tools that can now be applied and further developed to completely intralink LANL. To benefit from the citation linking, both the User and the Author interfaces to LANL have to be redesigned so as to adapt them to this advanced form of navigation and to universalize them for all disciplines. It is the Cornell team, with their track record of success in solving the associated interoperability and metadata problems with NCSTRL and CoRR who will be applying their expertise and experience here. And of course the unique success of the LANL team in having designed the Archive and its robust software, rendering it the indispensable resource it is, makes it the critical core partner in this collaboration (although LANL, already supported by NSF, is not requesting any funding). LANL is in many ways a microcosm for the future direction of the research literature on the Web as a whole. The project is also being undertaken in association with the Association of Computing Machinery in the US and the British Computer Society in the UK. It is hoped that this project, if successful, will both focus and accelerate progress in a direction that will be beneficial to the world scholarly/scientific community. Full text: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/citation.html Comments would be welcome