For Whom the Gate Tolls? How and Why to Free the Refereed Research Literature Online Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving, Now.StevanHarnadauthorABSTRACT: All refereed journals will soon be available online; most of them already are. This means that
anyone will be able to access them from any networked desk-top. The literature will all be interconnected by
citation, author, and keyword/subject links, allowing for unheard-of power and ease of access and
navigability. Successive drafts of pre-refereeing preprints will be linked to the official refereed draft, as well
as to any subsequent corrections, revisions, updates, comments, responses, and underlying empirical
databases, all enhancing the self-correctiveness, interactivity and productivity of scholarly and scientific
research and communication in remarkable new ways. New scientometric indicators of digital impact are also
emerging <http://opcit.eprints.org> to chart the online course of knowledge. But there is still one last frontier
to cross before science reaches the optimal and the inevitable: Just as there is no longer any need for research
or researchers to be constrained by the access-blocking restrictions of paper distribution, there is no longer
any need to be constrained by the impact-blocking financial fire-walls of
Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View (S/L/P) tolls for this give-away literature. Its author/researchers
have always donated their research reports for free (and its referee/researchers have refereed for free), with
the sole goal of maximizing their impact on subsequent research (by accessing the eyes and minds of
fellow-researchers, present and future) and hence on society. Generic (OAi-compliant) software is now
available free so that institutions can immediately create Eprint Archives in which their authors can
self-archive all their refereed papers for free for all forever <http://www.eprints.org/>. These interoperable
Open Archives <http://www.openarchives.org> will then be harvested into global, jointly searchable "virtual
archives" (e.g., <http://arc.cs.odu.edu/>). "Scholarly Skywriting" in this PostGutenberg Galaxy will be
dramatically (and measurably) more interactive and productive, spawning its own new digital metrics of
productivity and impact, allowing for an online "embryology of knowledge."EconomicsArchivesPeer ReviewCopyright2001Journal (On-line/Unpaginated)