2. Mechanisms of academic knowledge distribution using the internet

2.4. Paper archives

Following Paul Ginsparg's ftp archive for physics papers [8], a number of public academic paper archives have been set up. Academics are free to up-load any papers they have written to the site which then archives them. The advantage of this over just having the papers on individual's faculty or personal home pages is that they can be stored in a consistent way so that they can be effectively searched using a search engine. The reader may feel they can rely on the continued existence and URL of these papers, so that they can reliably refer to them there. Finally `alert' services can be added so that readers can be notified by e-mail when new papers arrive in their chosen categories. These archives do not give any guarantee of quality, although only academics tend to post papers to them and some idea of quality can be guessed at by the author, the title, the institution of the author etc. However one can not restrict the search to quality papers only, one can only access them on their explicit content.

A Proposal for the Establishment of Review Boards - Bruce Edmonds - 16 MAR 99

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