** Cross-Posted **

      For hyperlinked references, see:
      http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/292-guid.html

The paper reprint request era's prime innovator, Eugene Garfield, had
already anticipated many of the current developments in Open Access:

      (1) Garfield, E. (1999) From Photostats to Home Pages on the World
      Wide Web: A Tutorial on How to Create Your Electronic Archive. The
      Scientist 13(4):14.
          EXCERPT: It is the utopian expectation of those who live
          in cyberspace that eventually most researchers will create
          Web sites containing the full text of all their papers... The
          social, economic, and scholarly impact of this development has
          major consequences for the future.
              Garfield, E. (1965) Is the 'free reprint system' free and/or
              obsolete? Essays of an Information Scientist 1:10-11.
              Garfield, E. (1972) Reprint Exchange. 1. The multimillion
              dollar problem ordinaire, Essays of an Information Scientist
              1:359-60.

      (2) Drenth, JPH (2003) More reprint requests, more citations?
      Scientometrics 56: 283-286.
          ABSTRACT: Reprint requests are commonly used to obtain a copy of
          an article. This study aims to correlate the number of reprint
          requests from a 10-year-sample of articles with the number of
          citations. The database contained 28 articles published in over
          a 10-year-period (1992-2001). For each separate article the
          number of citations and and the number of reprint requests were
          retrieved. In total 303 reprint requests were analysed. Reviews
          (median 9, range 1 to 95) and original articles (median 8, range
          1-36) attracted most reprint requests. There was an excellent
          correlation between the number of requests and citations to
          article (two-tailed non-parametric Spearman rank test r = 0.55;
          95% confidence interval 0.18-0.78, P < 0.005). Articles that
          received most reprint requests are cited more often.

      (3) Swales, J. (1988), Language and scientific communication. The
      case of the reprint request. Scientometrics 13: 93-101.
          EXCERPT: This paper reports on a study of Reprint Requests
          (RRs). It is estimated that tens of millions of RRs are mailed
          each year, most being triggered by Current Contents...

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In the online era, the days of reprint requests ought to be over,
with Open Access taking their place. But some research funders and
universities are still hesitating about mandating Open Access
Self-Archiving, because they are concerned about publishers'
embargoes. Here is the solution:

          Even where a publisher embargoes or does not endorse OA
          self-archiving, universities and research funders can and
          should still go ahead and mandate immediate deposit anyway,
          with no exceptions or delays, but allowing the deposit to be made
          Closed Access instead of Open Access during any publisher-imposed
          embargo period.

The Institutional Repository's semi-automatized Email Eprint Request
Button will provide almost-immediate, almost-OA to tide over all
researcher usage needs webwide till the end of the embargo (or till
embargoes die their natural and well-deserved deaths, under the
growing pressure and increasingly apparent benefits of OA).

Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
      http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/

UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt an policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
      http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
      http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
      http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html

OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
      BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
      http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
      BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
      a suitable one exists.
      http://www.doaj.org/
AND
      in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
      in your own institutional repository.
      http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
      http://archives.eprints.org/
      http://openaccess.eprints.org/