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Contents Next: Refereeing and Reliability Up: Technology and Access Previous: Encoding Mathematical Language

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Papers are increasingly being distributed electronically. Originally driven by e-mail preprint servers and now by ``document vault"-like, Web-based storage systems (and by a few electronic journals), these ``e-prints" change the traditional way of funding scientific publication. Formerly, page charges for which professors were given grant money used to pay for publications. Increasingly now, computer networking (still often paid by grant money) is replacing physical publication.

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However this distribution is still fragmented and piecemeal. The preprints distributed in this fashion are mostly unrefereed, and the archival value is often dubious. The computer system itself that you have stored your magnum opus on may be gone in a year or less---what happens to your paper, then? Worse, how do you refer to the wonderful preprints that you just read? And how reliable were they, anyway, being unrefereed?

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omp@cecm.sfu.ca