John Smith wrote:
> Stevan,
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:JISC-
>> [log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
>> Sent: 25 June 2008 16:35
>>
>> Arxiv has been up for 17 years and its users have been doing the
>> keystrokes spontaneously: No keystroke inertia, not need for
>> mandates.
>>
>> But this spontaneous key-stroking (which has also been there among
>> computer scientists and economists) has, in 17 years, likewise
>> failed
>> utterly to generalize to the rest of the scholarly scientific
>> community.
>>
>
> It's a cultural thing :-) . Physicists exchanged pre-prints long before the net and had computerised preprint indexes (not full text) back in the 70s. All currently active physicists have spent all their working lives in a networked world and been totally comfortable in it. So it is not surprising that they took to the precursors of ArXiv and then ArXiv like ducks to water.
>
That's pretty much true (at least for a sub-set of physicists). After
all, wasn't this interweb thing invented to support exchange of physics
research in the first place?
Phil
> An aside: I wonder (just a thought) if the manual indexing is a leftover from those pre-full text days?
>
> In the same way economists had a culture of exchanging working papers before networks. Moving to online just made the process easier.
>
> So it's partly just time and partly how easy it is to map the publishing/communication model of a particular academic group onto a networked world.
>
> Regards,
>
> John Smith.
>
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