The fruits of self-archiving

Stevan Harnad

In collaboration with: Les Carr, Steve Hitchcock, Rob Tansley, Zhuoan Jiao, Tim Brody, Chris Gutteridge,

John Greenland, Cathy Hunt, Matt Hemus, Tim Chown, Adrian Pickering (and of course Wendy Hall)

BBS 1978 -

• Impact Factor: 15• Open Peer

Commentary• Turnaround time• Navigability• Space constraints• Waiting for its medium

to come into its own...

Psycoloquy 1989 -

• Online homologue of BBS

• Authors still timid• Sponsored by APA• Indexed by ISI/APA

since 2000 -• Still waiting for its

time to come...

Scholarly Skywriting 1990

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

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

Los Alamos Physics arXiv 1991-

• Started as preprint email list

• Then became web eprints site

• Since growing and growing (currently 30K papers deposited a year, total so far 150K papers)

• But still only growing linearly...

Subversive Proposal 1994

• The proposal to free the research literature through self-archiving

• Originally formulated for anonymous FTP and WWW home-page

• Self-archiving’s time still waiting to come...

CogPrints 1997 -

• Generalize eprint self-archiving in Physics to the Cognitive Sciences

• Much better interface than arXiv (Matt Hemus, Rob Tansley, Chris Gutteridge)

• But still only 1K papers so far...

American Scientist Forum 1998 -

• Discussing ways to free the research literature

• CalTech Provosts’s Initiative (Scholars’ Forum) 1998

• Ebiomed - PubmedCentral - BioMed Central 1999

OpCit 1999 -

• Citation Linking of Physics arXiv

• Generalizing to distributed archives

• New scientometric analyses and measures

Open Archives Initiative 1999 -

• Interoperability through uniform metadata sharing

• Central and Distributed Archiving

• Harvesting into global “virtual” archives

• Open-archiving not= Self-archiving

eprints.org 2000 -

• Generalization of CogPrints

• OAI-compliant• Eprint-archive-

creating software• Will distributed

institutional self-archiving do it at last…?