[OWW-SC] OWW Publishing with arXiv.org

[Drew Endy]

I think that this is a good idea.  Either we need to do this, or  
something equivalent ourselves.  Drew


On Oct 31, 2007, at 11:04 AM, Julius B. Lucks wrote:

> 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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