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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. 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.