Just established: new neuroscience archives

[Partha Mitra]

A neuroscience hierarchy has been established on the e-print 
archive at xxx.lanl.gov.  This is an established archival site,
sponsored by the NSF, that currently receives over 20,000
preprints and reprints each year, mostly in physics. Data rich
research communities, such as astrophysics, are able to publish 
important sets of data (or links to the larger sets) in a 
central, easily accessible location.

Some background information about the impact that the archive 
has had on physics and some related fields is available at

        http://xxx.lanl.gov/blurb/sep96news.html

The site is primarily a means for efficient distribution and 
archival. Submissions are not reviewed (although "response"
papers can be submitted), and so it does not replace conventional
journals.  Experience with the existing archives suggests that
submissions tend to maintain a high level of scholarship.

We suggest that there are a number of benefits that the 
neuroscience community might expect to obtain from this archive:

* The archives provide a means of rapid and widely accessible
dissemination of research results in the form of preprints or reprints.

* Shorter notes, algorithms, or interesting data sets (with a short
descriptive abstract) can be published independently of long papers
and thus speed the distribution of important information.

* The archive provides a central resource to make available important
raw data sets for further scrutiny.  For lengthy data sets, a short
description with appropriate hyperlinks will be appropriate.

* Technical reports, either on computational, instrumental, or
preparatory procedures, can be made widely available.

* Conference proceedings papers that aren't indexed or that don't
receive wide distribution will be easily accessible.

* The archive is mirrored in 14 different countries that are spread
across the globe, with the network still growing.  In particular, 
in countries where the costs of institutional subscriptions to journals 
are impractical, the archive has become the primary research source.

There are three subcategories in the Neuroscience group, following the
example of the Journal of Neuroscience:

* 'neuro-cel' for Molecular/Cellular Neuroscience
* 'neuro-sys' for Behavioral/systems Neuroscience
* 'neuro-dev' for Developmental Neuroscience

A computational or theoretical category has been initially avoided
in order to keep theoretical, modeling and analysis studies mixed in
with the experimental work.

To reach the front pages for the archives connect to

        http://xxx.lanl.gov/archive/neuro-cel
or
        http://xxx.lanl.gov/archive/neuro-sys
or
        http://xxx.lanl.gov/archive/neuro-dev

Papers may be uploaded in a variety of formats (TeX and LaTeX are
preferred;
PostScript that is generated as a print file by Microsoft Word is
acceptable), which are then automatically converted to various
file types for downloading.  Instructions for both submission and
retrieval are available from the web site. In particular, see
http://xxx.lanl.gov/faq/.

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The neuroscience archives were initiated as a subcategory 
of the existing e-print archives at LANL during the
Analysis of Neural Data Workgroup 
(see http://sdphln.ucsd.edu/research/neurodata/)
at the Marine Biological Laboratories, sponsored by the 
National Institutes of Mental Health.
The e-print archives at the Los Alamos National Laboratory 
are supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation.
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