Electronic Preprints Point the Way to ‘Author Empowerment’

While traditional publishers try to extend their publishing empires onto the Internet, an underground movement of researchers hopes to head them off. Its goal is to turn the electronic medium into a means of “author empowerment,” in the words of physicist Paul Ginsparg of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Led by Ginsparg and Stevan Harnad, director of the Cognitive Sciences Center at the University of Southampton in England, they are trying to prove, as Ginsparg puts it, that not only can scientific articles be published over the Internet “unbelievably efficiently,” but they can be offered virtually free to all comers.