Two Preprint Project Announcements

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Here are two announcements that came across the e-waves in the last few
days, FYI, for those intersted in the unrefereed, unlicensed scientific
literature.  Comments welcomed here.

Ann Okerson
__________________________________

(1)  From the Library Journal Electronic Newswire.  NOTE:  To set the
record straight, we've been told that the casting of the meeting as a
Ginsparg project is inaccurate -- the concept is the brainchild of Herbert
Van de Sompel, a researcher at the University of Ghent, current working at
the Los Alamos Laboratory.

****

MEETING SET FOR GINSPARG'S UNIVERSAL PREPRINT SERVICE

More than 20 members of the scholarly communications community--including
representatives of Stanford Library's Highwire Press, CNI's Cliff Lynch,
the Library of Congress's Caroline Arms, and Don Waters from the Mellon
Foundation--have already confirmed their participation in a conference
next month on the Universal Preprint Service project (UPS). UPS aims to
devise a framework to allow for open access to an cross disciplinary
library of "author self-archived scholarly literature," commonly called
preprints or e-prints. Announced this past July by Paul Ginsparg and his
associates at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, UPS aims to build on the
work of NIH's PubMed Central, Ginsparg's own physics e-print warehouse at
Los Alamos, and other discipline-based archives to create a method of
unifying these sites to create a "fundamental and free layer of scholarly
information." Information about the conference and links to the initial
proposal are available at http://vole.lanl.gov/ups/ups.htm.

_________________________________________________________________

NOTE:  Not clear there is much content on this site yet; and unlike
the much-maligned PubMedCentral, this project seems to have received
comparatively little attention.  We wonder what the publishing world
thinks of it -- though it seems that Springer Verlag will be linking
its abstracts or TOCs into it.

****

(2) From the GOVDOC-L list

Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 13:10:42 -0400
From: Kathleen Chambers <Kathy_Chambers@ccmail.osti.gov
Subject: A new electronic service from the Department of Energy
To: GOVDOC-L@lists.psu.edu

The Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science and the Government
Printing Office (GPO) are pleased to announce the development and public
availability of PubSCIENCE on October 1, 1999.  GPO is sponsoring the
public access of PubSCIENCE through its GPO Access Web site.

PubSCIENCE, developed by DOE's Office of Scientific and Technical
Information (OSTI), focuses on the physical sciences and other
energy-related disciplines.  This new PubSCIENCE service focuses on the
physical sciences and other energy-related disciplines. Approximately 1000
scientific and technical journals from over twenty participating
publishers will initially be searchable from PubSCIENCE.  It was modeled
after the highly recognized PubMed, which covers medical sciences for the
National Institutes of Health.  Like PubMed, PubSCIENCE will continue to
expand with the vision of becoming a huge resource of published
information.

PubSCIENCE's easy-to-use search system provides the scientific and
educational community a long-needed resource to quickly identify and
locate peer-reviewed journal articles without navigating through
individual publisher web sites or searching through multiple journal
publications.  The user can navigate across hundreds of bibliographic
citations from multiple journal sources and identify information of
interest.  The user can then link directly to the publisher's doorstep to
view the electronic full-text.  Access to the full-text will normally
require a subscription, site license, or pay-per-view arrangement.
Fee-based arrangements to view the full-text at the publisher's site are
the responsibility of the users.

Last year, OSTI's DOE Information Bridge was made available through GPO
Access.  These new systems represent the latest in a series of web-based
public services developed by OSTI for public use within the past 3 years.  
Check out OSTI's home page http://www.osti.gov/resource.html to see the
public resources.

Kathleen Chambers
Office of Scientific and Technical Information
U.S. Department of Energy
Oak Ridge, Tennessee  37830
kathy.chambers@ccmail.osti.gov
phone: 423 576-0487

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