Integrating, Navigating and Analyzing Eprint Archives Through Open Citation Linking (the OpCit Project)

The Los Alamos Eprint Archive (LANL) is a public repository for a growing proportion of the current research literature in Physics. The Open Citation-linking Project (OpCit) is making this resource still more powerful and useful for its current physicist users by connecting each paper to each paper it cites; this can be extended to all the rest of the disciplines in other Open Archives designed to be interoperable through compliance with the Santa Fe Convention. A citation-linked online digital corpus also allows powerful new forms of online informetric analysis that go far beyond static citation analysis, measuring researchers' usage of all phases of the literature, from pre-refereeing preprint to post-refereeing postprint, from download to citation, yielding an embryology of learned inquiry.