---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2000 21:42:07 +0000
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@COGLIT.ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
Subject: Re: academic press policy

On Wed, 8 Mar 2000, Ken Weiss (California Digital Library Technologies) wrote:

> I agree with Stevan's assessment that once a paper is placed on any
> web server accessible by the public and open to search engine robots,
> the genie is out of the bottle, the worms are out of the can, the
> horse is out of the barn, and there's no getting it back in there.
>
> My concern with including links to 'personal' servers on an eprint
> site is technical. Those links need to be maintained. By allowing an
> 'abstract + link' model (absent a robust and widely adopted solution
> for creating and resolving persistent identifiers), we greatly
> increase the likelihood of broken links on the preprint server. I see
> '404 Document Not Found' often enough already...

I agree completely with Ken. Archives should contain the full text, not
just the link, and the distinction between "personal" server and "other"
should be ignored for the nonsense it is.

> >(3) And, yes, the Santa Fe protocol and the Open Archives Initiative
> ><http://www.openarchives.org/> are definitely relevant, because they
> >will make university authors' "personal" archives completely
> >interoperable, so their contents will be searchable and retrievable
> >exactly as if they were all in one big archive.
>
> I'm not convinced that we've given enough thought to the implications
> of a large number of small author-managed repositories with regard to
> the issues of access, availability and persistency of scholarly
> publications. It's very cheap and easy to set up a server. It's much
> more difficult and costly to keep it running over the long haul, with
> good security, reliability, performance, and consistency.

The solution (again, given the genie/bottle facts Ken confirms) will of
course be for an archive-of-archives that harvests and backs up
individual open-archive contents cumulatively. To get and keep the ball
rolling towards the optimal and inevitable, though, subversive local
archiving NOW is preferable to waiting for any other archiving LATER.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stevan Harnad                     harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Science    harnad@princeton.edu
Department of Electronics and     phone: +44 23-80 592-582
             Computer Science     fax:   +44 23-80 592-865
University of Southampton         http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Highfield, Southampton            http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM

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