Thank God, it is finally happening. I have long wished to have access
to the peer-reviewed articles and academic literature. I hope that this
continues and grows.
Stevan Harnad wrote:
a>
a> To all cognitive and biobehavioral scientists:
a>
a> You are invited to archive your preprints and reprints in the
a> CogPrints electronic archive.
a>
a> The Archive covers all the Cognitive Sciences:
a> Psychology, Neuroscience, Biology, Computer Science, Linguistics and
Philosophy
a>
a> CogPrints is completely free for everyone, both authors and readers,
a> thanks to a subsidy from the Electronic Libraries Programme of the
a> Joint Information Systems of the United Kingdom and the collaboration
a> of the NSF-supported Physics Eprint Archive at Los Alamos.
a>
a> CogPrints has just been opened for public automatic archiving. This
a> means authors can now deposit their own papers automatically. The
first
a> wave of papers had been invited and hand-archived by CogPrints in
order
a> to set a model of the form and content of CogPrints.
a>
a> To see the current holdings:
a>
a> http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/
a>
a> To archive your own papers automatically:
a>
a> http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/author.html
a>
a> All authors are encouraged to archive their papers on their home
a> servers as well.
a>
a> For ferther information: admin at coglit.soton.ac.uk
a>
a> --------------------------------------------------------------------
a>
a> BACKGROUND INFORMATION
a>
a> (No need to read if you wish to proceed directly to the Archive.)
a>
a> The objective of CogPrints is to emulate in the cognitive and
a> biobehavioral sciences the remarkable success of the NSF-subsidised
a> Physics Eprint Archive at Los Alamos
a>
a> http://xxx.lanl.gov
a>
a> The Physics Eprint Archive now makes available, free for all, over
half
a> of the annual physics periodical literature, with its annual growth
a> strongly suggesting that it will not be long before it becomes the
a> locus classicus for all of the literature in Physics.
a>
a> What this means is that anyone in the world with access to the
Internet
a> (and that number too is rising at a breath-taking rate, and already
a> includes all academics, researchers and students in the West, and an
a> increasing proportion in the Third World as well) can now search and
a> retrieve virtually all current work in, for example, High Energy
a> Physics, much of it retroactive to 1990 when the Physics archive was
a> founded by Paul Ginsparg, who must certainly be credited by
historians
a> with having launched this revolution in scientific and scholarly
a> publication (www-admin at xxx.lanl.gov).
a>
a> Does this mean that learned journals will disappear? Not at all. They
a> will continue to play their traditional role of validating research
a> through peer review, but this function will be an "overlay" on the
a> electronic archives. The literature that is still in the form of
a> unrefereed preprints and technical reports will be classified as
such,
a> to distinguish it from the refereed literature, which will be tagged
a> with the imprimatur of the journal that refereed and accepted it for
a> publication, as it always has been.
a>
a> It will no longer be necessary for publishers to recover (and
research
a> libraries to pay) the substantial costs of producing and distributing
a> paper through ever-higher library subscription prices: Instead, it
will
a> be the beneficiaries of the global, unimpeded access to the learned
a> research literature -- the funders of the research and the employers
of
a> the researcher -- who will cover the much reduced costs of
implementing
a> peer review, editing, and archiving in the electronic medium alone,
in
a> the form of minimal page-charges, in exchange for instant, permanent,
a> worldwide access to the research literature for all, for free.
a>
a> If this arrangement strikes you as anomalous, consider that the real
a> anomaly was that the authors of the scientific and scholarly
periodical
a> research literature, who, unlike trade authors, never got (or
expected)
a> royalties for the sale of their texts -- on the contrary, so
important
a> was it to them that their work should reach all potentially
interested
a> fellow-researchers that they had long been willing to pay for the
a> printing and mailing of preprints and reprints to those who requested
a> them -- nevertheless had to consent to have access to their work
a> 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/>> --
>> '`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`''`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`
> sci.psychology.research is a moderated newsgroup.
> Before submitting an article, please read the guidelines which are posted
> here bimonthly or the charter on the web at http://www.grohol.com/spr/> Submissions are acknowledged automatically.
--
'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`''`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`
sci.psychology.research is a moderated newsgroup.
Before submitting an article, please read the guidelines which are posted
here bimonthly or the charter on the web at http://www.grohol.com/spr/
Submissions are acknowledged automatically.
