FinalReporttotheNSF-DepartmentofComputerScience-Cornell.doc

Final Report to the NSF: The Open Citations Project: Integrating and Navigating Eprint Archives through Citation Linking Project Number IIS-9907892 Project Background and Motivation For decades there have been frequent and intense discussions about the real and potential effects that open access to research papers may have on the scholarly community and associated communities (government and industrial laboratories, educators, etc.). While some of these discussions precede the Internet, certainly the rapid emergence of the Web has amplified them. The ability of the Web to immediately broadcast research results combined with the increased rapidity of results in many fields have added new pressure on publishers, scholarly societies, libraries, and other information intermediaries to development new solutions. The recognition of the Web as a technical foundation for new publishing solutions has led to a number of changes in scholarly publishing of the last decade. A class of new alternatives collectively known as Eprint Archives has emerged that offer scholars the opportunity to self archive research papers without the mediation of traditional publishers. Some well-known instances of these eprint archives include the physics arXiv developed originally at Los Alamos National Laboratory and run now at Cornell University, the CogPrints archive for cognitive sciences run out of University of Southampton, the Cryptology ePrint Archive run out of UCSD, and the more journal-oriented BioMed Central. A few of these, most notably arXiv, have led to structural changes in scholarly exchange in their target communities. These new publishing solutions raise important questions in a number of areas. What are the economic models for these archives? How do these new publishing vehicles interact with traditional models for academic promotion and tenure? How does peer review as a vehicle for quality assurance transfer to this new domain? What are the cultural barriers within sp