Requirements on First Publication Archives

General background

For the purpose of the ETAI, a First Publication Archive is an organization that provides the following services to authors of research papers and to the scientific community in our field:

• Receiving research papers from authors and making them available on the Internet over an extended period of time. These articles are to be considered as published in the sense of the ETAI.
• Safeguarding the integrity of the document, so that its contents can not be changed during the period of availability. This also includes, very definitely, that the author shall not be able to modify or withdraw his or her work during that period.
• Making sure that the copyright conditions and other legal aspects are such that the reader community does not encounter any problems in obtaining copies of these articles and in using them for legitimate academic purposes in teaching and research.

The ETAI will identify a number of approved First Publication Archives. In order to be considered by the ETAI scientific publishing system, an article must first of all have been published by an ETAI approved FPA.

Approval criteria for First Publication Archives

The following criteria will be applied.

Persistency criteria

Identity on the net. The FPA must be associated with a specific site on the Internet, containing a WWW server, and it must be plausible that this site will remain on the net without interruption and that it will continue to provide a server.

Reliable operating organization. An organization of professional quality must be operating the site.

Official commitment to remain. There must be a formal decision by a body which has the authority to make such a decision, such as the board of the university, that the FPA will retain articles on the net for a specified period once they have been published. This period must not be less than 20 years from the date of publication. The commitment may be conditional on force majeure and other unlikely events outside the control of the committing body.

Well defined escape procedure. For the unlikely enventuality that the FPA will not be able to continue its operation, there must be a well defined procedure for how to transfer the contents of the FPA to one or more other sites. This procedure must be technically realistic and legally valid.

Public and inspectable procedure to guarantee that published articles do not change over time. It is foreseen that "public notary" services for electronic seals will be created, and until then we need to use a combination of technical and administrative measures to make sure that articles are persistent.

Presentation criteria

Publication procedure. The articles made available by the FPA must be presented as having been published. In particular, the stream of articles published by the FPA must be assigned an ISSN number in the standard way.

If one and the same operating organization publishes several series of articles, each having its own identity and ISSN number, then each of those series will be considered as a separate FPA for the purposes that follow.

Graphical appearance. The FPA must use and enforce criteria for the graphical appearance of published articles, making a serious attempt to maintain a high and uniform graphical standard. The ETAI will not attempt to be judge of taste, but it will not approve an FPA that clearly does not care about this matter. The use of a standardized style is highly recommended.

The graphical design shall be made so that it looks nice when printed on A4 size paper (210*297 mm). At the same time, information must not be lost if it is printed on American letter size paper (218*282 mm), although aesthetic quality may be compromised in this case.

Linguistic appearance. The FPA must use and enforce the obvious requirement that articles are correct with respect to grammar, vocabulary, and spelling.

Citations. It is recommended (but not required) that the references used in or at the end of the article are constructed using a database scheme, or at least a uniform naming scheme, so that an on-line version of the article or its reference list can be equipped with hot links and be amenable to automatic analysis (for example, for creating inverted reference lists). The copyright conditions on the article must not allow such usage of the list or set of references.

Selection criteria

FPA editor. Before being accepted by the FPA, articles must be screened by an editor who checks that the article is scientifically reasonable and that it does not contain materials that are contrary or irrelevant for the scientific purpose of the article.

The purpose of this screening is only to be a filter against more or less obvious garbage; it does not constitute scientific quality control and does not replace peer review.