Re: Persistent URLs Considered Useful

[Asgaard <asgaard@cor.sos.sll.se>]

Librarians have been busy in this area. Electronic journals
will soon (well, it will take a few years...) become the
prefered method for scientific publishing. Pre-publishing,
peer-review, certification, post-certification addenda (and
sometimes even revocation, if cheating has been proven).
Similar methods have been used in the technical development
of the Internet for decades but now other fields are catching
on.

An example of public peer-review techniques
http://www.mja.com.au/review/oprtprot.html

A functioning and respected scientific e-journal
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/

The Linkoping University Electronic Press
http://www.ep.liu.se/
and more specifically
http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/cgi-bin/epa/protect.html
describes PGP-signing the MD5 hashes of articles. They
will guarantee their on-line survival for 25 years. Also,
paper copies are stored in the deep archives of several
Swedish University libraries. I guess they don't guarantee
that the URL will stay the same for 25 years, but why not.


Asgaard