-------- Original Message --------
Subject: For Whom the Gate Tolls?
Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2000 21:57:50 +0000
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@cogprints.soton.ac.uk>

The following paper is available at:

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm

Comments welcome.

To be presented at:

Roundtable on Subversive Proposal. American Historical Society. January
4-8 2001 Boston 2001.
http://www.theaha.org/annual/program/program.html

and

10th Australasian Information Online Conference. Sydney
Australia, 13th to 22th January, 2001
http://www.csu.edu.au/special/online2001/index.html

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          For Whom the Gate Tolls?

          Freeing the Scholarly and Scientific Research Literature
          Online Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving

          Stevan Harnad
          Southampton University

              ABSTRACT: All refereed journals will soon be available
              online; most of them already are. This means that anyone
              will be able to access them from any networked desk-top.
              The literature will all be interconnected by citation,
              author, and keyword/subject links, allowing for
              unheard-of power and ease of access and navigability.
              Successive drafts of pre-refereeing preprints will be
              linked to the official refereed draft, as well as to any
              subsequent corrections, revisions, updates, comments,
              responses, and underlying empirical databases, all
              enhancing the self-correctiveness, interactivity and
              productivity of scholarly and scientific research and
              communication in remarkable new ways. New scientometric
              indicators of digital impact are also emerging
              <http://opcit.eprints.org> to chart the online course of
              knowledge. But there is still one last frontier to cross
              before science reaches the optimal and the inevitable:
              Just as there is no longer any need for research or
              researchers to be constrained by the access-blocking
              restrictions of paper distribution, there is no longer
              any need for research or researchers to be constrained by
              the impact-blocking financial fire-walls of
              Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View (S/L/P) tolls for
              this give-away literature. Its author/researchers have
              always donated these research reports for free (and its
              referee/researchers have refereed for free), with the
              sole goal of maximizing their impact on subsequent
              research (by accessing the eyes and minds of
              fellow-researchers, present and future) and hence on
              society. Generic (OAi-compliant) software is now
              available free so that institutions can immediately
              create interoperable Eprint Archives in which their
              authors can self-archive all their refereed papers for
              free for all forever <http://www.eprints.org/>. These
              interoperable Open Archives <http://www.openarchives.org>
              will then be harvested into global, jointly searchable
              "virtual archives" (e.g., <http://arc.cs.odu.edu/>).
              "Scholarly Skywriting" in this PostGutenberg Galaxy will
              be dramatically (and measurably) more interactive and
              productive, spawning its own new digital metrics of
              productivity and impact, allowing for an online
              "embryology of knowledge."