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 nterconnected 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 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 . These interoperable Open Archives will then be harvested into global, jointly searchable "virtual archives" (e.g., ). "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."

[1]  Ian Butterworth,et al.  The impact of electronic publishing on the academic community : An International Workshop organized by the Academia Europaea and the Wenner-Gren Foundation , 1998 .

[2]  Les Carr,et al.  Developing services for open eprint archives: globalisation, integration and the impact of links , 2000, DL '00.

[3]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  How and Why To Free All Refereed Research From Access- and Impact-Barriers Online, Now , 2001 .

[4]  Joseph Y. Halpern.  CoRR: a computing research repository , 2000, AJCD.

[5]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  A Subversive Proposal , 1995 .

[6]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  The Self-Archiving Alternative , 2001 .

[7]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  Implementing peer review on the net: scientific quality control in scholarly electronic journals , 1996 .

[8]  Alex Bloss.  Pioneering new serials frontiers: From petroglyphs to cyberserials , 1997 .

[9]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry , 1990 .

[10]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing, Association of Research Libraries. 1995. 250 pages. ISBN: 0-918006-26-0. $20.00 , 1996 .

[11]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  Integrating, Navigating and Analyzing Eprint Archives Through Open Citation Linking (the OpCit Project) , 2000 .

[12]  Gregory B. Newby,et al.  Scholarly publishing: the electronic frontier , 1996 .

[13]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  Up for Debate: CMC as a support for course related discussion in a campus university setting , 2000 .

[14]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge , 1991 .

[15]  Charles Oppenheim,et al.  The legal and regulatory environment for electronic information , 1995 .

[16]  Stevan Harnad.  AAAS's Response: Too Little, Too Late , 2001 .

[17]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  The self-archiving initiative , 2001, Nature.

[18]  E. Garfield.  Citation indexes for science. A new dimension in documentation through association of ideas. 1955. , 1955, International journal of epidemiology.

[19]  Andrew M. Odlyzko,et al.  The Economics of Electronic Journals , 1997, First Monday.

[20]  B. Gorayska,et al.  Cognitive Technology: In Search of a Humane Interface , 1995 .

[21]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  The (Refereed) Literature-Liberation Movement , 2001 .

[22]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  Research Access, Impact and Assessment , 2001 .

[23]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  Electronic Journal Forum: Resetting Our Intuition Pumps for the Online-Only Era: AConversation With Stevan Harnad. , 1999 .

[24]  Richard Ekman,et al.  Technology and scholarly communication , 1999 .

[25]  Stevan Harnad.  Interactive publication: Extending the American Physical Society's discipline-specific model for electronic publishing , 1992 .