At 11:05 PM 6/30/99 +0100, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>        The BMJ/Stanford Self-Archiving Initiative
>
>        British Medical Journal (1999) 318:1637-1639
>        http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/318/7199/1637
>        http://chronicle.com/free/99/06/99063001t.htm

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

First free ISPs, now free archiving everywhere? Looks like we can expect a
rash of these announcements. But not all will be the same, and while first
reactions to the initiatives announced so far seem encouraging, 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. As well as the matter of unrefereed vs. refereed deposit and
the perennial copyright issue, 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
Multimedia Research Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ,  UK
Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (01)703 593256          Fax: +44 (01)703 592865