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R. Hanisch (STScI)
Despite the tremendous advances in electronic publications and the increasing rapidity with which papers are now moving from acceptance into ``print,'' preprints continue to be an important mode of communication within the astronomy community. The Los Alamos e-preprint service, astro-ph, provides for rapid and cost-free (to authors and readers) dissemination of manuscripts. As the use of astro-ph has increased the number of paper preprints in circulation to libraries has decreased, and institutional preprint series appear to be waning. It is unfortunate, however, that astro-ph does not function in collaboration with the refereed publications. For example, there is no systematic tracking of manuscripts from preprint to their final, published form, and as a centralized archive it is difficult to distribute the tracking and maintenance functions. It retains documents that have been superseded or have become obsolete. We are currently developing a distributed preprint and document management system which can support both distributed collections of preprints (e.g., traditional institutional preprint series), can link to the LANL collections, can index other documents in the ``grey'' literature (observatory reports, telescope and instrument user's manuals, calls for proposals, etc.), and can function as a manuscript submission tool for the refereed journals. This system is being developed to work cooperatively with the refereed literature so that, for example, links to preprints are updated to links to the final published papers.
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://doright.stsci.edu/Epreps/. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: hanisch@stsci.edu