[Tugindia] Re:[OT] article on (open) scientific publishing

[Shashikiran Ganesh]

>     Ajit> expensive. (some stats: annually 1.2m articles gets
>     Ajit> published in 16k periodicals. cornell university's library
>     Ajit> budget went up by 149 percent in 15 years, but number of
>     Ajit> periodicals went up by only 5 percent.)
> 
> Thanks Ajit. You did the job, I was about to post the article to the
> list!
> 
> I was curiously watching the developments relating to open access
> journal initiatives worldwide, primarily the initiatives of Public
> Library of Science and Berlin Declaration in which Elsevier too sent
> their delegates!  Nothing substantive happened except wild screams
> about open access.
> 
> Two factors count much -- (1) the technologies of text processing, its
> various delivery formats and delivery systems (2) who will foot the
> bill?
> 
> Unless the above two factors are answered satisfactorily, open access
> movements will not be able to compete with publishers like Elsevier.
> Needless to say that still more global experiments/initiatives are in
> the horizon, which will become reality very soon (of course with
> Indian participation) where the above two issues are addressed to a
> reasonable level.
> 
> Radhakrishnan
> 

Many of you maybe aware of arxiv.org, which allows authors to submit their papers 
in tex format and the resulting submission is archived for download by those interested.
Their implementation is quite good and seems to have stood the test of time.  
The entire paper maybe downloaded in pdf/ps format (on the fly processing from the tex 
source) or just the abstract as submitted by the author.   An interesting news item on 
this site (for members of this list) is on 28th Dec 1998:  

28 Dec 1998 
    
    New domain name arXiv.org registered. All of archive.org,
    archives.org, thearchive.org, thearchives.org were already taken. Since the
    word 'archive' has a Greek root, X indicates the Greek Chi, imitating
    Donald Knuth's usage in the scientific typesetting language TeX (pronounced
    Tech), also preserving at least one of the original three x's. Note also
    that the word archive itself goes back to the greek "archos" for ruler, or
    "arche" to begin or rule, where "archeion" was the government house, and
    led to the latin "archivum" as a place where public records or historical
    documents were preserved -- hence it was natural for what is now arXiv to
    have in the .gov domain.


----
The original archive was at the address http://xxx.lanl.gov/

The Indian mirror is maintained at the IMSC and is accessible at the URL: http://in.arxiv.org/  

regards,
Shashi
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