On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, forsdyke wrote:
> Stevan Harnad wrote:
>> > The only question is about what active researchers, with finite
> > lifetimes, eager to maximize their scientific productivity and impact,
> > ought to do in the meanwhile, and I think it is completely obvious to
> > anyone who thinks about it (the logic of it, the justice of it, and the
> > pragmatics of it) exactly what that is. The contributors to Los Alamos
> > have already shown us all the way.
> > That era is now over for this special literature, and it is entirely up
> > to us when we elect to reap the scientific benefits of that fact. The
> > Net and XXX have led us to the water: It is now up to us to drink.
>> Once again, I agree whole-heartedly. However, I do not see why the
> private sector could not appreciate all your points and get into this
> act, rather than leave it to the Physicists and (perhaps) NIH to
> spell-out the doom of much of the paper literature. One of the major
> publishing houses could, tomorrow, open up a secure and internationally
> replicated archive and charge $100 a shot for straight deposits, $200
> for peer-reviewed "authenticated" deposits, etc. Promising new advances
> in "hypersearching the web" (Scientific American June 1999), will
> greatly facilitate the task of sifting all this literature.
>> Sincerely, Donald Forsdyke. Discussion Leader. Bionet.journals.note
Ah me! Our universities already have free servers for us, which could
all be drawn together into one Virtual Archive, by, say, NCSTRL.
http://www.ncstrl.org/
So what is all this nonsense about commercial publishers coming in at
$100 a pop? Since when are publishers server-providers? Do you think
their one calling is to slap a toll on whatever we try to do?
You are thinking in all the old, wrong categories.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stevan Harnad harnad at cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Science harnad at princeton.edu
Department of Electronics and phone: +44 1703 592-582
Computer Science fax: +44 1703 592-865
University of Southampton http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/
