For Whom the Gate Tolls?

All refereed journals will soon be available online; most of them already are. This means that anyone will be able to access them from any networked desk-top. The literature will all be interconnected by citation, author, and keyword/subject links, allowing for unheard-of power and ease of access and navigability. Successive drafts of pre-refereeing preprints will be linked to the official refereed draft, as well as to any subsequent corrections, revisions, updates, comments, responses, and underlying empirical databases, all enhancing the self-correctiveness, interactivity and productivity of scholarly and scientific research and communication in remarkable new ways. New scientometric indicators of digital impact are also emerging <http://opcit.eprints.org> to chart the online course of knowledge. But there is still one last frontier to cross before science reaches the optimal and the inevitable: Just as there is no longer any need for research or researchers to be constrained by the access-blocking restrictions of paper distribution, there is no longer any need to be constrained by the impact-blocking financial fire-walls of Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View (S/L/P) tolls for this give-away literature. Its author/researchers have always donated their research reports for free (and its referee/researchers have refereed for free), with the sole goal of maximizing their impact on subsequent research (by accessing the eyes and minds of fellow-researchers, present and future) and hence on society. Generic (OAi-compliant) software is now available free so that institutions can immediately create Eprint Archives in which their authors can self-archive all their refereed papers for free for all forever <http://www.eprints.org/>. These interoperable Open Archives <http://www.openarchives.org> will then be harvested into global, jointly searchable "virtual archives" (e.g., <http://arc.cs.odu.edu/>). "Scholarly Skywriting" in this PostGutenberg Galaxy will be dramatically (and measurably) more interactive and productive, spawning its own new digital metrics of productivity and impact, allowing for an online "embryology of knowledge."

open access, toll access, peer review, self-archiving, research impact, copyright, citation linking, scientometrics

Ashgate Publishing

Harnad, Stevan

442ee520-71a1-4283-8e01-106693487d8b

Law, Derek

Andrews, Judith

2003

Harnad, Stevan

442ee520-71a1-4283-8e01-106693487d8b

Law, Derek

Andrews, Judith

Harnad, Stevan (2003) For Whom the Gate Tolls? In, Law, Derek and Andrews, Judith (eds.) Digital Libraries: Policy Planning and Practice. Ashgate Publishing.

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Published date: 2003

Additional Information: Harnad, Stevan (2001/2003) For Whom the Gate Tolls? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/39/ Published as: Harnad, Stevan (2003) Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access. In: Law, Derek & Judith Andrews, Eds. Digital Libraries: Policy Planning and Practice. Ashgate Publishing 2003. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/digital-libraries.htm [Shorter version: Harnad S. (2003) Journal of Postgraduate Medicine 49: 337-342. http://www.jpgmonline.com/article.asp?issn=0022-3859;year=2003;volume=49;issue=4;spage=337;epage=342;aulast=Harnad] [French version: Harnad, S. (2003) Ciélographie et ciélolexie: Anomalie post-gutenbergienne et comment la résoudre. In: Origgi, G. & Arikha, N. (eds) Le texte à l'heure de l'Internet. Bibliotheque Centre Pompidou. Pp. 77-103. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/cielographie.pdf http://www.text-e.org/conf/index.cfm?ConfText_ID=7 http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/texte2.pdf]

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