OPEN ARCHIVING FOR OPEN RESEARCH

It is a foregone conclusion that all refereed journals will soon be available online; most of them already are. This means that one can 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 and interactiveness of scholarly and scientific research and communication in remarkable new ways. 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 to be constrained by the access-blocking restrictions of paper distribution, there is no longer any need to be constrained by the access-blocking financial fire-walls of Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View (S/L/P) tolls for this give-away literature that its authors have always donated for free (and its referees have refereed for free), with the sole goal of maximizing their impact on research (by accessing the eyes and minds of fellow-research) and hence on society