Subject: Stevan Harnad: CogPrints: Archive of Articles in Psychology... From: Dan Ellis <dpwe(at)ICSI.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 14:42:44 -0700Dear List - I was sent the following announcement by Stevan Harnad for his on-line electronic preprint archive. It's not specifically AUDITORY-related, but the discussion over copyright and electronic publishing he highlights is certainly interesting. DAn. ------- Forwarded Message Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 13:09:07 +0100 (BST) From: Stevan Harnad <harnad(at)COGLIT.ECS.SOTON.AC.UK> To: Cognitive Science List <cogsci(at)mailbase.ac.uk> Subject: CogPrints: Archive of Articles in Psychology, Neuroscience, etc. CogPrints Author Archive To all biobehavioral, neural and cognitive scientists: You are invited to archive all your preprints and reprints in the CogPrints electronic archive: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk There have been some very important developments in the area of Web archiving of scientific papers in recently. Please see: Science: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html Nature: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html American Scientist: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/amlet.html Chronicle of Higher Education: http://www.chronicle.com/free/v45/i04/04a02901.htm The CogPrints Archive covers all the Cognitive Sciences: Psychology, Neuroscience, Biology, Computer Science, Linguistics and Philosophy CogPrints is completely free for everyone, both authors and readers, thanks to a subsidy from the Electronic Libraries Programme of the Joint Information Systems of the United Kingdom and the collaboration of the NSF/DOE-supported Physics Eprint Archive at Los Alamos. CogPrints has recently been opened for public automatic archiving. This means authors can now deposit their own papers automatically. The first wave of papers had been invited and hand-archived by CogPrints in order to set a model of the form and content of CogPrints. To see the current holdings: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/ To archive your own papers automatically: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/author.html All authors are encouraged to archive their papers on their home servers as well. For further information: admin(at)coglit.soton.ac.uk - -------------------------------------------------------------------- BACKGROUND INFORMATION (No need to read if you wish to proceed directly to the Archive.) The objective of CogPrints is to emulate in the cognitive, beural and biobehavioral sciences the remarkable success of the NSF/DOE-subsidised Physics Eprint Archive at Los Alamos http://xxx.lanl.gov (US) http://xxx.soton.ac.uk (UK) The Physics Eprint Archive now makes available, free for all, well over half of the annual physics periodical literature, with its annual growth strongly suggesting that it will not be long before it becomes the locus classicus for all of the literature in Physics. 25,000 new papers are being deposited annually and there are over 35,000 users daily and 15 mirror sites worldwide. (Daily statistics: http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/todays_stats) What this means is that anyone in the world with access to the Internet (and that number too is rising at a breath-taking rate, and already includes all academics, researchers and students in the West, and an increasing proportion in the Third World as well) can now search and retrieve virtually all current work in, for example, High Energy Physics, much of it retroactive to 1990 when the Physics archive was founded by Paul Ginsparg, who must certainly be credited by historians with having launched this revolution in scientific and scholarly publication (www-admin(at)xxx.lanl.gov). Does this mean that learned journals will disappear? Not at all. They will continue to play their traditional role of validating research through peer review, but this function will be an "overlay" on the electronic archives. The literature that is still in the form of unrefereed preprints and technical reports will be classified as such, to distinguish it from the refereed literature, which will be tagged with the imprimatur of the journal that refereed and accepted it for publication, as it always has been. It will no longer be necessary for publishers to recover (and research libraries to pay) the substantial costs of producing and distributing paper through ever-higher library subscription prices: Instead, it will be the beneficiaries of the global, unimpeded access to the learned research literature -- the funders of the research and the employers of the researcher -- who will cover the much reduced costs of implementing peer review, editing, and archiving in the electronic medium alone, in the form of minimal page-charges, in exchange for instant, permanent, worldwide access to the research literature for all, for free. If this arrangement strikes you as anomalous, consider that the real anomaly was that the authors of the scientific and scholarly periodical research literature, who, unlike trade authors, never got (or expected) royalties for the sale of their texts -- on the contrary, so important was it to them that their work should reach all potentially interested fellow-researchers that they had long been willing to pay for the printing and mailing of preprints and reprints to those who requested them -- nevertheless had to consent to have access to their work restricted to those who paid for it. This Faustian bargain was unavoidable in the Gutenberg age, because of the need to recover the high cost of producing and disseminating print on paper, but Paul Ginsparg has shown the way to launch the entire learned periodical literature into the PostGutenberg Galaxy, in which scientists and scholars can publish their work in the form of "skywriting": visible and available for free to all. - -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad harnad(at)cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Psychology harnad(at)princeton.edu Director, phone: +44 1703 592582 Cognitive Sciences Centre fax: +44 1703 594597 Department of Psychology http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ University of Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM ftp://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/ See: Science: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html Nature: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html American Scientist: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/amlet.html Chronicle of Higher Education: http://www.chronicle.com/free/v45/i04/04a02901.htm ------- End of Forwarded Message