I don't disagree with anything John writes below:

(1) Yes, web-posted, unpublished papers are being read, used, cited  
-- and sometimes they are even good!

(2) They can and should and are being deposited in IRs too, in  
addition to the primary OA target: refereed journal articles.

(3) No, neither the RAE nor tenure/promotion committees nor journals  
regard this unpublished papers as published papers. They can and  
should be and are being listed in CVs and cited as unpublished papers.

Where's the point of disagreement?

If unrefereed, unpublished papers deposited in IRs are to be called  
some sort of publication at all, then that sort of publication  
already has a name: Vanity Press (or Self-Publication). (I prefer  
"preprint" or  "ms. in prep", because it has a more hopeful ring to  
it, heralding things to come, like, maybe, publication!)

Chrs, Stevan

On 15-Mar-06, at 9:46 AM, J.W.T.Smith wrote:

> Stevan, et al,
>
> No amount of pontificating or dogmatic definition tweaking is going  
> to put
> this genie back in the bottle. Any document made publicly available is
> 'published' by any reasonable definition of the word. To insist  
> that it is
> not really published until it has been through a refereeing stage and
> appeared in an acknowledged journal is rearranging the deckchairs  
> after
> the Titanic has sunk. Many respectable research papers are  
> appearing (ie,
> being published), being read and cited (and the citations are being
> tracked by search services) before any peer review or even if no peer
> review is planned. IRs are part of a new publishing system whether  
> their
> original proponents want them to be or not.
>
> How many IRs contain only the type of material specified by Stevan?  
> We are
> in the planning stage for our IR and it will be limited to research
> outputs but it will certainly not be limited to only refereed material
> which has been (or is to be) published in a recognised journal.
>
> Regards,
>
> John Smith,
> University of Kent.
>
>
> On Wed, 15 Mar 2006, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 15 Mar 2006, Wolfgang Greller wrote:
>>
>>> Can anyone tell me whether articles published in an institutional  
>>> e-print
>>> repository count as publication in UK RAE terms?
>>
>> Absolutely not! "Publication" in the UK RAE and in every other  
>> sensible
>> venue, means (in the case of research articles) publication in a  
>> reputable
>> peer-reviewed journal, not vanity self-publication.
>>
>> Nor is OA self-archiving self-publication. It is access-provision --
>> providing supplementary access to an already-published article, in
>> order to maximise its usage and impact, not in order to generate a
>> spurious entry under "Publications" in one's CV. The place in one's
>> CV for unpublished papers is, as always, "Unpublished Papers."
>>
>>     http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/8705/01/resolution.htm#1.4
>>
>> Stevan Harnad
>> American Scientist Open Access Forum
>> http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open- 
>> Access-Forum.html
>>
>> Chaire de recherche du Canada           Professor of Cognitive  
>> Science
>> Ctr. de neuroscience de la cognition    Dpt. Electronics &  
>> Computer Science
>> Université du Québec à Montréal         University of Southampton
>> Montréal, Québec                        Highfield, Southampton
>> Canada  H3C 3P8                         SO17 1BJ United Kingdom
>> http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/                http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ 
>> ~harnad/
>>