Slide 13 of 22
Notes:
What is an e-print archive?
They are sometimes also called e-print servers or repositories. They are electronic distribution servers for research papers. Authors can submit their papers to the archive. Readers can retrieve papers from the archive either through a web interface, or by sending commands to the system via e-mail.
Los Alamos Preprint server - the first of its kind and still the most famous. Started in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg. Physics and related disciplines. Now located at Cornell University. The UK mirror is at Southampton University.
Relationship with traditional journals - Ginsparg�s concept was that the pre-publication version of the paper would be deposited on the server, to speed up the communication process. The final peer-reviewed version would be published in a traditional print journal which would remain the scholarly archive.
So - not established with the aim of challenging commercial publishers (unlike SPARC) , but to offer rapid and free access to fellow researchers. Advocates maintain it is not an alternative to publishing in traditional high-impact journals � it is a parallel development.
