Stevan Harnad wrote:
>> To all biobehavioral, neural and cognitive scientists:
>> You are invited to archive all your preprints and reprints in the
> CogPrints electronic archive: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk>> There have been some very important developments in the area of
> Web archiving of scientific papers recently.
Dr. Harnad,
Thank you for this great proposal for bringing electronic
publication to the biological sciences. Could you briefly tell us what
steps are being taken to ensure that material, once deposited, is not
interfered with. I would love, for example, to publish an article
discovering the structure of DNA which I would date 1952, the year
before Watson and Cricks' famous paper.
The only way to cover this point would seem to be to have
simultaneous deposition in multiple sites (>2), and have a search engine
of some kind constantly monitoring the sites to ensure that all copies
remain identical. This is something like GenBank,where depositions of
DNA sequences are made simultaneously in the USA, Europe and Japan.
There is also the question of how to cite this
information. Rather than some abstract number, why not follow the
pattern of joural citations. e.g. Harnad, S. Cogprints 1999, 4:10-1610.
In this case the "volume" number (4) would be the month and the "page"
numbers would be the day and hour-min (preferably corrected to GMT).
Thus the citation would contain an implicit time-stamp.
Sincerely, Donald Forsdyke. Discussion Leader. Bionet.journals.note
http://post.queensu.ca/~forsdyke/mind.htm
