[ih] ARPANET 50-year anniversary panel session with Vint, Steve Crocker, and others

[John R. Levine]

> So, ... perhaps the way to publish "a paper" for open access by current
> and future historians is to make it an RFC...?  Assuming that is even
> permitted of course.  But it seems contrary to the traditional purpose
> of RFCs et al.  The format constraints might also be an obstacle.

RFCs exist because their publication is subsidized to the tune of $1m/yr 
by the Internet Society, with the money currently mostly coming from the 
.org registry.  The authors or their employers may donate their time, but 
the editors and publisher and web servers and so forth do not happen for 
free.

There is an independent submission stream whose editor has broad 
discretion about what to publish.  Arpanet at 50 seems plausible, so why 
not drop a note to the editor and ask.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/about/independent/

Also, you know, there's a reason that a lot of journals are published in 
both online and paper form.  Once copies get into academic libraries, they 
may be harder to find if you're not physically at the institution, but 
they are unlikely all to disappear.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly