[UPS] FW: RePEc mentioned in Science article (fwd)

[Carl Lagoze]

Hi all,

Is it my imagination or does this Science article differ substantially in
content from the press release that is on the ups web site and which was
sent to all of us.  First point (for which you can all accuse me of focusing
on personal interests) is there is no mention of Dienst or common metadata
throughout this entire article.  Second point, and the one I find more
disturbing, is that the article focuses on the "Santa Fe Agreement" which
from my memory we almost all saw as seriously flawed and almost a
non-starter.  The press release uses the term Santa Fe Convetions which is
much more accurate.

Where did the source for this Science article come from?

Carl

------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Carl Lagoze, Digital Library Scientist
Department of Computer Science, Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853 USA
Phone: +1-607-255-6046
FAX: +1-607-255-4428
E-Mail: lagoze@cs.cornell.edu
WWW: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/lagoze/lagoze.html


-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Brickley [mailto:Daniel.Brickley@bristol.ac.uk]
Sent: Monday, November 08, 1999 1:01 PM
To: Carl Lagoze
Subject: RePEc mentioned in Science article (fwd)



dont know if you saw this already

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 1999 15:33:43 +0000
From: Thomas Krichel <T.Krichel@surrey.ac.uk>
Reply-To: repec-tech@mailbase.ac.uk
To: RePEc-tech List <RePEc-tech@mailbase.ac.uk>
Subject: RePEc mentioned in Science article


  From this week's edition of "Science".
  Do not circulate this widely because it is copyrighted

  Thomas Krichel                       http://gretel.econ.surrey.ac.uk
                                   RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
  offline 1999-11-18 to 1999-11-21


SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING:
Researchers Plan Free Global Preprint Archive

Eliot Marshall

While the National Institutes of Health (NIH) moves ahead with plans
to create a free database of biological publications, a group of
research librarians and information experts is trying to concoct
something more far-reaching.  The leaders--who are following the model
of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) physics archive--met last
week in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to begin working out the framework for a
"universal preprint archive" that would include papers from all
disciplines. By November, according to spokesperson Herbert Van de
Sompel of the University of Ghent in Belgium, the group hopes to
release a set of indexing protocols that would permit authors to
deposit their work at participating sites and readers to retrieve the
full text at no cost.

Van de Sompel, an expert on digital libraries, teamed up with Paul
Ginsparg, founder of the LANL archive, and LANL research library
director Rick Luce to organize last week's meeting. In attendance were
more than 20 information specialists representing a variety of
institutions, from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology to NASA and the U.S. Library of Congress. All support
the idea of making scientific papers freely accessible to the public,
although individual participants differ on specifics, such as how to
handle non-peer-reviewed material.

The group aims to encourage the growth of preprint repositories such
as the Los Alamos archive and knit them together with a set of
protocols.  Ginsparg's project at LANL began in 1991 as an archive for
physics. Now it contains more than 100,000 papers on math, physics,
and computer science. Ginsparg declined to discuss the new project in
detail but said, "The hope is ... [to] catalyze real progress in new
scholarly publishing models over the next 5 to 10 years" (see
vole.lanl.gov/ups).

Several groups have already established preprint archives in their own
disciplines, some of which have grown rapidly. For example, economists
have organized several repositories in a site called Research Papers
in Economics, coordinated by Thomas Krichel of the University of
Surrey, U.K.  (netec.mimas.ac.uk/RePEc).  And Stevan Harnad of the
University of Southampton, U.K., oversees CogPrints, a collection of
papers in cognitive science, psychology, neurology, linguistics, and
related fields (cogprints.soton.ac.uk). Last week's meeting was aimed
at stimulating other grass-roots efforts.

Van de Sompel says they "managed to agree on some important technical
matters that will enable the creation of cross-archive end-user
services," which are now being worked out in detail. The format is
likely to follow a model described in a draft "Santa Fe Agreement"
released earlier this month by Krichel. This draft, which lacks the
indexing tags agreed upon last week, establishes a process by which
archives and data providers can affiliate with the group. For example,
it requires unanimous consent for changes and declares that the
objective is "open and cooperative" sharing of data.

The Santa Fe effort differs in tone from NIH's PubMed Central: It's
more radical. At present, the latter is gearing up to be a distributor
of traditional peer-reviewed articles. But the Santa Fe archivists are
focused on another type of scholarly discourse, one in which editors,
peer reviewers, and paper will be optional.