Invitation to archive your papers in CogPrints Archive

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