John,
Couldn't agree more.
In Wikipedia "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat's_Last_Theorem" it
says:
"In 1637 Pierre de Fermat wrote, in his copy of Claude-Gaspard
Bachet's translation of the famousArithmetica of Diophantus, "I have a
truly marvellous proof of this proposition which this margin is too
narrow to contain." (Original Latin: "Cuius rei demonstrationem
mirabilem sane detexi. Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet.")"
The history of maths would have been very different had this remark
not survived.
Best,
Peter
On 10 Feb 2009, at 19:17, Delasalle, Jenny wrote:
> Mike, et al,
>
> It has never been clear to me why some repositories have a
> restriction to peer-reviewed only. As far as I am concerned any work
> produced by an academic and is claimed by that academic to be an
> academic/research output IS such and it is not my place to dispute
> this. Otherwise I am infringing on academic freedom and acting as an
> unqualified arbiter/censor. I would go further and say such
> distinctions are restrictive of information/knowledge dissemination.
> For many subjects the lightly refereed conference paper is the norm
> for publishing of new results and discussion of the latest ideas and
> these may even be selected on an abstract rather than the final
> paper. Also solid work is written up in Working Papers and Technical
> Reports and all these too should be in repositories and made visible
> to the world. Restrictions are for bureaucrats, my job is to
> encourage and improve academic communication and information
> dissemination.
>
> Regards,
>
> John Smith,
> Administrator of the Kent Academic Repository – KAR,
> University of Kent, UK.
>
|