Demoprints: Seeing/Doing the Keystrokes is Believing/Knowing

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

For those of you who have never self-archived a paper, or who have 
questions, uncertainties or doubts about how easy/difficult, slow/fast
it is to self-archive, please try out Demoprints:

    http://demoprints.eprints.org/

Demoprints is there for those who have not yet self-archived, or are
thinking about or planning to create an institutional OA archive, or
have definite ideas (pro or con) about self-archiving, yet have never
actually done the keystrokes.

All you have to do is register (as you will in any archive), and then
deposit a paper. You may be surprised at how fast and simple the thing
turns out to be that everyone is making so much pre-emptive fuss about
(without ever actually having done it):

    Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A
    Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.
    http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/
    ABSTRACT: A common objection to self-archiving is that it is an
    extra task that puts an unnecessary burden on each researcher. In
    particular, the need to enter the extra bibliographic metadata
    demanded by repositories for accurate searching and identification
    is presumed to be a particularly onerous task. This paper describes a
    preliminary study on two months of submissions for a mature repository
    and concludes that the amount of time spent entering metadata would
    be as little as 40 minutes per year for a highly active researcher.

    Harnad, S. Putting the Berlin Principle into Practice:
    The Southampton Keystroke Policy.
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin3-harnad.html
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin3-harnad.ppt

Stevan Harnad