There are several important differences between a text which has been published electronically by LINEP and a text which has been made available over the Internet by its own author:
LINEP therefore combines several of the traditional roles of an academic publishing house and a university library. Most important, it is a method for an author to make his or her work available to the world, and to make sure that it will remain available. The persistence is stronger than with a conventional publisher: whereas a printed book may go out of stock, a book published by LINEP will stay available. In this sense it is similar to a library, but of course the immediate world-wide access offered by LINEP can not be matched by a conventional library.
There are also some functions of a traditional publishing house that LINEP does not offer. It does not do advertising: the work of getting people interested in the work is completely up to the author(s). It also does not pay royalties: we assume that the text has been written as part of the author's employment, and that he/she has already been paid for that.
The services offered by LINEP are free services in the same way and to the same extent as our university library is a free service. This means that it is at present free of charge, but that we may possibly impose a nominal distribution fee in some future, corresponding to the cost of transmitting the document.
The following describes the policies of LINEP in more detail.
The main rule for all of these categories is that once an article has appeared through LINEP, it shall stay perennially available. Under no circumstance shall it happen that a published text later becomes unavailable. This is a natural requirement in order that a citation of the text shall be meaningful. However, the detailed conditions vary slightly between the cases mentioned above.
For monographs, scientific journals, and collections of articles except Ph.D. collections, the appearance of the text through LINEP constitutes publication, and persistent electronic availability is unrestricted. A refereeing process which guarantees academic quality is assumed in all these cases.
For technical reports, the appearance through LINEP is a form of prepublication, which means that the text has not passed ordinary scientific reviewing, and that publication e.g. in a scientific journal is foreseen for later. In this case, LINEP still guarantees that the bibliographic information (author, title, date of appearance, etc) and the abstract of the report will be permanently available on-line. If the author so requires, LINEP will remove the full text of the report from electronic access, provided that the same or essentially the same text is published elsewhere so that it is publicly available, for example in a scientific journal. A textual reference to the new point of publication will be provided by LINEP in place of the full text. Furthermore, a paper version of the text will be retained in Linköping University Library using the same routines as for other technical reports.
These rules are made in order to accomodate the case where the publisher of the definite article insists on obtaining the copyright of the article and restricts its free electronic distribution. If the final publisher does not require this from the author (for example if the final publisher is an electronic journal) then LINEP will retain the full text of the article even after its refereed publication.
For those Ph.D. and licentiate theses which are constructed as a set of articles, LINEP will prefer to retain the full text of all the included articles. However, if it is necessary in order to comply with the copyright rules of where the articles where first published, LINEP will use the same method as for technical reports.
Electronic abstract bulletins (EAB), finally, are journal-like publications containing abstracts of articles which have appeared in full elsewhere. The full text may be a regularly published article, but it may also be a technical report. By general conventions, such abstracts are in the public domain and can be copied and redistributed freely, and LINEP will therefore retain such EAB:s so that they are electronically available without interruption.
LEUP also takes for granted that an abstract must describe an actual article, and not merely an intended one. Therefore, our EAB:s will only accept an abstract if the full text is submitted at the same time, and is persistently available, either by being published, or by being included in the LINEP repository of technical reports or another similar repository. In this way, LINEP will strive to maintain the link to the full text of the article described by the abstract, and to update it as required (in particular when a technical report obtains status as a published article).
Note that the combination of a technical report and an electronic abstracts bulletin offers a method of well-defined appearance of a research result, in an incontestable fashion and at a well-defined date which precedes the regular publication date, but without causing any obstacle for regular scientific publication.
The first question to be resolved is ``what about those changes which are objectively reasonable'', such as those corrections which do not change the contents of text, but just rectify writing errors. The LINEP policy is to accept errata lists, which are afterall the traditional method of dealing with printing errors. Each errata list is dated, like other texts, and the electronic entry for an article or monograph will contain links to the errata list(s) that arrives later on. However, the original text will under no circumstances be changed.
Of course, once the errata have been submitted, the author is free to construct a revised article where the corrections have been made, and to offer it to the world as a ``corrected version'' of the article. LINEP will accept to include links to such ``corrected versions'' as a service to its readers. However, we will not take any responsibility for the correctness of the update, and corrected versions will not be stored and distributed by LINEP itself.
Two other option will also be available to authors. Within three months after the date of appearance of a text at LINEP, the author is allowed to replace the text by a corrected one, so that the original text is withdrawn from electronic availability and the new one takes its place. In this case, the date of appearance is of course redefined to be the date of the revised text. This option may only be used once for a given text. The title must remain unchanged, and if there are several authors then the agreement of all authors is required. After three months, no replacement is permitted.
Finally, the author is always allowed to add a comment to any text that he has previously published through LINEP. Such comments may e.g. state corrections to previous material, or place it in context. Commentary may be added at any time, and LINEP will store the commentary (as long as it is of reasonable size) and include a link to it in the entry for the original text. In case there are several authors, each author or subset of authors has a right to enter commentary. Commentary from non-authors are not accepted.
Another possible reason for change is if the format of the document needs to be revised, for example because of a change in the formatting system (such as replacing current postscript by a newer variant) which may render the existing version unreadable for many users. If this happens, LINEP:s policy will be to do whatever is needed and possible in terms of automatic transformation, for example running a program that transforms the older postscript to newer conventions, or converting postscript to a full-image document that can be distributed using a fax server. On the other hand, LINEP will not be involved with regeneration of the document from its original sources (for example in Latex) or with any other operation which can not be done automatically for a large number of documents. This policy is chosen both in order to limit the effort and in order to safeguard the integrity of the text against inappropriate changes.
The policies that have been described so far aim to minimize the operations that may need to be performed on a document over time, and to facilitate the creation of reliable document protection routines. The following are some additional steps that are taken for the same purpose:
Additional measures will be considered.
LINEP assumes that documents will be read from the following types of platforms: PC with Windows, Mac, or Unix. The main publishing format at present is postscript. We foresee that as a temporary measure it may be necessary to maintain several variants of a text, namely one for each type of platform. We look of course forward to installing a platform-independent format as soon as possible.
LINEP will not distribute the source text (for example in Latex) from which the postscript version has been generated. At the point where a hypertext format becomes sufficiently expressive and broadly accepted (for example a continued development of HTML) LINEP will consider the possibility of publishing texts in that format as well.