Re: Serials Review Interview

From: Thomas Krichel <T.Krichel_at_SURREY.AC.UK>
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1998 16:38:05 JST

  Mark Doyle write

> > One thing that has happened is that an individual author wants
> > to open a personal archive only for her reprints, because a clause in
> > most copyright transfer agreements allows for reprint in "collection
> > that only contain the authors work.
>
> Hmmm, seems having a systematic way of integrating these personal
> collections under one umbrella, even if it is distributed, violates the
> spirit of the clause, no?

  no, because all we integrate is the metadata and/or the doc
  not the metadata and the documents.

> Why should authors stop there and not push for even more permissive
> copyright agreements that permit centralized archving as well?

  Fine, but in the meantime, we can use the personal archive rather
  than having the papers in the toll-gated format only.

> > Some are. Others are run by central banks or economics think tanks.
> > These are larger archives that we expect to be quite stable.
>
> I could see making a case for the latter, but I still think they too would
> be better served if they also put their work in a centralized place.

  Yes, it is always possible to argue that. Somehow that argument
  does not get through, because there is no central archive in the
  first place. And nobody can come along and claim they are the
  central archive becasue noone holds the critical mass in
  the first place.

> > Yes.
>
> Including legacy conversion of old papers and not just accepting new
> formats that come along?

  If it sis not too difficult than the major providers will do it
  and the majors are all I really care about.
>
> Sorry, it didn't come across that way (mostly because of the misinformation
> about NCSTRL and its relationship with xxx)

  I stated extracts from the CoRR doc and gave an interpretation. You
  disagreed with my interpretation, but I fail to see that I misinformed
  anyone.

> In any case, the question of when a paper should
> become available on a centralized archive to all is, to a large extent, a
> community dependent one.

  to be determined by the community at large and not by the few that have
  write access to the central hard disk.

> Otherwise, if any member of the distributed network is ephemeral,
> unmaintained, or otherwise lacking, the community loses.

  The community also looses in a centralised system when a sizable
  chunk of the publishing process can not be automated. In the centralised
  case the cost can be distributed to the authors. In the decentralised
  case is can be distributed to representatives of the authors that
  are more alert of the problems of metadata creation and maintenance.



  Thomas Krichel mailto:T.Krichel_at_surrey.ac.uk
                                             http://gretel.econ.surrey.ac.uk
Received on Tue Aug 25 1998 - 19:17:43 BST

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