How and Why to Free the Refereed Research Literature Online Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving, Now

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 refe- reed draft, as well as to any subsequent corrections, revi- sions, updates, comments, responses, and underlying em- pirical databases, all enhancing the self-correctiveness, in- teractivity and productivity of scholarly and scientific re- search 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 op- timal 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 authors/researchers have always donated their research reports for free (and its