G.B, Wills and three co-authors, Virtual Research Environments: A Literature Review, a preprint, May 3, 2005. Excerpt: 'The accepted role of scientific and scholarly publication is to record research activity in a timely fashion, keeping others in the research community up to date with the current developments. Until very recently, it has been the case that printed journals were the most efficient method for the dissemination and archival of research results. Technical advances in the past decade have allowed the process of scholarly communication to take other forms, particularly in the dissemination and storage of articles via the World Wide Web....Open Archiving started with the aim of increasing the sharing and reuse of scientific information by promoting the development of interoperable archives of scientific literature. The most prominent example is the High Energy Physics (HEP) archive which currently has over 220,000 articles and 12,000 users a day. However, increased access for e-scientists to an article is not the final goal of an Open Archive. It also seeks to improve the impact of that article (the take-up of its ideas and the subsequent use, refinement or generalisation of its results). Running in parallel with the (sometimes lengthy) publication process and avoiding the toll-based access of journal subscription, the HEP archive allows physicists to increase the tempo of their literature by reducing the delay between the appearance of an article and the appearance of a citation to it to less than a month. The majority of these articles are subsequently refereed and appear in print journals, but the use of this 'direct dissemination' mechanism increases the speed of access to the latest scientific results and decreases the "impact delay" between projects.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/04/2005 12:02:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
