Caution: Anarchic Archiving Stevan Harnad 01 Jul 1999 11:45 UTC
Caution Against Anarchic Archiving! On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Steve Hitchcock wrote: > Not to forget free Web access to all papers, including e-prints and > refereed papers, recently announced by the commercial publisher Current > Science > http://current-science-group.com/Presscos.html > > ...not all > such initiatives will be positive for the academic community or will help > towards the goal of universally accessible, free e-print archives in > perpetuity... > ...other important factors to consider when > evaluating these archives are ownership and long-term plans for access, > distribution, mirroring, etc, to avoid the same hostage to fortune that > journals have come to represent. Multiple archives are fine, but there > should be scope for integration via distributed services too. Steve Hitchcock is 100% right for sounding this important note of caution. What is not wanted is an anarchic-archivng period of fly-by-night archives in which authors' papers become orphaned (as they have in many other ephemeral web and ftp sites) or are stamped with a proprietary price-tag after an interval. (I am not implying that this is the case with the Current Science Archive or any of the other nascent ones, but it is something that must be given explicit consideration. Let me add, though, that the Current Science Archive, like the BMJ/Stanford Archive, is for UNREFEREED preprints only; apart from that, it is in reality endeavouring to be a JOURNAL, not an archive, for it plans to offer peer review for papers if they are submitted on the refereeing track. As I have cautioned many times before, founding new archives should NOT be confused or conflated with founding new journals, nor with reforming peer review. The purpose of public online archives is to free the journal literature for one and all; there is a place for new online journals too, as there always has been, but that is an incomparably smaller matter, and only beclouds the free-archive issue if linked to it in any way. Peer review can do with some reform too, but that is a long-term empirical problem, requiring experimental testing, and hence likewise not to be linked in any way with the fate of freeing the journal literature through self-archiving, whose time has now come, and whose empirical success has already been resoundingly demonstrated by the Los Alamos Archive <http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions>). -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Science harnad@princeton.edu Department of Electronics and phone: +44 2380 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 2380 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/