Academic self - documentation : which way forward for computing , library and information science ? ∗ accepted at ICADL 2001

There has been a lot of discussion about the potential for free access to scholarly documents on the Internet. At the turn of the century, there are two major initiatives. These are arXiv, which covers Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science and RePEc, which covers Economics. These initiatives work in very different ways. This paper is the fruit of collaboration between authors working for both initiatives. It therefore reflects the perspective of people working to achieve change, rather than an academic perspective of pure observation. We first introduce both arXiv and RePEc, to highlight the basic dichotomy between centralized and decentralized archives. We then discuss at some length the history of self-archiving in Computer Science. We introduce recent developments, the Open Archives Initiative and the Academic Metadata Format, focusing on social rather than technical issues. We then discuss how, building on these developments, the self-archiving situation in Computing and Library and Information Science can be