Friends: Here is some very good news fro Stevan Harnad. Thanks to the efforts of Peter Suber in collaboration with Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.archive.org%2F will now begin serving not only as a back-up for institutional OA archives worldwide, but also as an OA archive for those researchers who are not affiliated with universities or research institutions with OA archives of their own. Here is the announcement from Peter Suber's Open Access News http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_04_03_fosblogarchive.html#a111297430... followed by some excerpt's from Peter's Sparc Open Access Newsletter: More on Brewster Kahle and the OA projects of the Internet Archive Paul Boutin, The Archivist: Brewster Kahle made a copy of the Internet. Now, he wants your files, Slate, April 7, 2005. http://slate.msn.com/id/2116329/ Excerpt: 'Kahle is less the Internet's crazy aunt --the tycoon who can't stand to throw anything away-- than its evangelical librarian. "The history of digital materials in companies' hands is one of...loss," he tells me in a rushed meeting. Like it or not, the Web is the world's library now, and Kahle doesn't trust the guys who shelve the books....Instead of creating another startup that crawls the Web to make money, Brewster used his millions to preserve as much knowledge as possible and --just as important-- make it accessible to anyone who can get to a computer....The Internet Archive isn't just the Wayback Machine --the nonprofit's two dozen or so employees have filled an equal amount of disk space with uploaded film collections, presidential debates, Bugs Bunny cartoons, and news broadcasts from the Middle East. The archive is especially keen on books. They've scanned about 25,000 of them so far as part of the Million Book Project, a collaboration with Indian and Chinese agencies to create an online library in the place of bricks-and-mortar reading rooms....The final step in building the archive into a true global library: getting you to contribute. Ourmedia, a project launched two weeks ago, offers free, unlimited, permanent storage of your videos, photos, Word files, podcasts?anything that's not porn and not covered by someone else's copyright. The one catch: The files, stored on Internet Archive servers, will be freely available to anyone in the world.' (Peter Suber: If you missed it, see this announcement from SOAN for 4/2/05: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/04-02-05.htm#oara 'Many publishing researchers don't have OA repositories in their institutions or disciplines. The missing piece of the puzzle is an OAI-compliant "universal repository" that will accept eprints from any scholar in any discipline. I'm very happy to say in public for the first time that Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive (IA) has agreed to launch just such a repository. I'm working with the technical staff of the IA to set it up now. Not only will it host new content for scholars with no other place to deposit their work, but it will offer to preserve all the other OAI-compliant repositories in the world. The IA's proven commitment to open access and long-term preservation make this a most exciting prospect.') http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/04-02-05.htm#oara (2) Many publishing researchers don't have OA repositories in their institutions or disciplines. The missing piece of the puzzle is an OAI-compliant "universal repository" that will accept eprints from any scholar in any discipline. I'm very happy to say in public for the first time that Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive (IA) has agreed to launch just such a repository. I'm working with the technical staff of the IA to set it up now. Not only will it host new content for scholars with no other place to deposit their work, but it will offer to preserve all the other OAI-compliant repositories in the world. The IA's proven commitment to open access and long-term preservation make this a most exciting prospect. Moreover, the good people at the Creative Commons are working on a drag-and-drop interface for depositing new eprints in the IA repository. More details later. The Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/ (1) The process of OA archiving is not intrinsically time-consuming or intimidating, but even low barriers are too high when authors are desperately short of time. One piece of good news is that we are making progress on automating the generation of metadata. This will reduce both the time and the difficulty of self-archiving and one day may automate the entire process after an author clicks "yes". Another piece of good news is that a new study by Leslie Carr and Stevan Harnad based on "two months of submissions for a mature repository" shows that "the amount of time spent entering metadata would be as little as 40 minutes per year for a highly active researcher." The problem isn't a real time-sink but a groundless fear of a time-sink. Leslie Carr and Stevan Harnad, Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving. A preprint put online March 15, 2005. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/ http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_03_13_fosblogarchive.html#a111100690... Automating or semi-automating the archiving deposit process won't help scholars without deposit rights at an OA, OAI-compliant repository, and a universal repository won't help scholars who believe they are too busy to bother. That's why it's important that we're seeing progress on both fronts at once. Each development removes another excuse for not archiving. 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