[OWW-SC] OWW Publishing with arXiv.org

[Julius B. Lucks]

Hi Bill and John (and SC),

I just had this idea so please excuse its half-bakedness.  What about  
promoting 'publishing' of oww materials on arXiv.org?

arXiv.org already has a quantitative biology section (http:// 
arxiv.org/list/q-bio/new), and I am willing to bet that essentially  
all papers coming out of the OWW community could fit into this  
section.  The arXiv allows you to post paper pre-prints online for  
free, and it is completely open access.  Every e-print has associated  
with it a unique id, that is completely referenceable in papers,  
etc.  In addition, if you do publish your paper in a journal, you can  
update arXiv e-print metadata with the journal reference, or a DOI of  
the journal article.

Compared to an alliance with Nature or some other body, promoting  
'publishing' on the arXiv has many advantages:

1.) It already exists and no agreement or negotiations need to be  
made to use it.  There is a very mild form of control in that people  
that are new to the arXiv system must be 'endorsed' by existing  
people, but this can be gotten around until enough OWW people are  
themselves endorsers.

2.) It provides all the functionality we want - some sort of official  
stamp on an OWW document in the form of an e-print that is completely  
referenceable and is more like a paper than a wiki page.  In fact,  
the arXiv supports the notion of versions, so that you can always  
submit a newer version of a resource, keeping complete access to  
older versions.

3.) There are many tools already in place, or being developed that we  
can integrate the arXiv with OWW.  As Bill knows, the arXiv already  
has an API that allows you to pull content from the arXiv into OWW  
trivially (by just specifying e-print id).  In addition, this API  
supplies journal references and DOI's if they are present, so it  
would be very easy to create references in the biblio extension for  
both the e-print and the published version.  Also, there is an ingest  
API in active development (and soon to be released) with which we  
could easily create our long-dreamed-of 'publish' button on OWW that  
could automatically publish an OWW page.

4.) Journals will accept papers that have been posted on the arXiv  
already.  In particular, Nature has committed to this as is evident  
on the Nature Proceedings page (http://precedings.nature.com/ 
about#journal-submissions)

"Nature Precedings hosts manuscripts that may be submitted to any  
journal of any publisher. Nature and all Nature journals have a  
policy that permits such posts on recognized pre- or e-print servers  
such as Nature Precedings and arXiv without affecting their  
eligibility for publication, whether or not such postings result in  
discussion on other sites and in the media. We cannot take  
responsibility for the possibility of scooping by competitors.  
Authors submitting to other journals are advised to check their  
policies about prior postings before sending manuscripts to Nature  
Precedings."

(In fact, Nature Precedings was heavily inspired by the arXiv.)

5.) If the quantitative biology community grows and needs more of a  
refined categorization (such as synthetic biology, etc.), the arXiv  
can expand its categorization scheme (which is how the q-bio section  
started in the first place).

6.) Integrating with the arXiv integrates what OWW is doing with the  
physics, math and computer science communities.

This is juts a brainstorm, but it seems to me like the arXiv could  
provide the avenue that we have been thinking about in the OWW  
publishing arena.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Julius


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