Re: [EP-underground] First message with questions

On Tue, 23 Jul 2002, ePrints Support wrote:

> Feel free to change their required status in you own system. (Edit 
> metadata-types.xml)

To add to what Chris said abouve about the "refereed" and "public
domain" tags:

Yes, you are free to change the configuration, but before you do, I hope
you will consider the importance of these two tags:

(1) For scientists and scholars perhaps the single most important criterion
for searching the research literature and for deciding whether or not a
paper is likely to be worth spending their limited reading time to read
is whether or not the paper has met the quality-control standards of
peer review (refereeing). Many users will want to restrict their searches
only to the peer-reviewed (refereed) sector of the eprint archive, and
even in wider searches will want to be able to segregate the output
into "refereed" and "unrefereed." If you remove the tag, you remove
that capability. (Some of it remains, because there will still be the
journalname tag, but "refereed" is simply equivalent to searching all
refereed journals, without having to specify the name of each.)

(2) "Public domain" is definitely not synomymous with "open access"!
Public domain means that the author has relinguished the copyright or
the copyright has expired, so anyone is entitled to archive the paper.
It is the only exception ("allo-archiving") that we allow to
self-archiving, and I would urge you to do the same. Everything that
is self-archived is open access, but most of it certainly is not public
domain!
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1612.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1713.html

Stevan Harnad

> On Tue, Jul 23, 2002 at 02:49:10PM -0300, Miguel Angel Mardero Arellano wrote:
> > 	We are an information research time from the Brazilian Institute for
> > Information in Science and Technology,  a subsidiary of Brazil?s National
> > Department of Science and Technology. We are implementing an e-print archive
> > for an Academic Association in Brazil and we are looking for an explanation
> > about the importance of two fields that must be filled out by the authors on
> > the bibliographic Information page. We were reading in all the documents
> > available from the main Open Archives Iniciative web site to try to find out
> > what is the real purpose of the Refereed field to be mantadory for all the
> > document types but book type, and also, we would like to know what is the
> > reason to include the Public Domain field (required) if the mean of "open"
> > is statated  since the moment the scientists want to use it for publication
> > and debate. 

>