MODERATOR'S NOTE: Because it is mainly about peer-review reform, the posting below has been re-directed from the prior "Eprint versions and removals" thread to:
Peer Review Reform Hypothesis-Testing http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0479.html A Note of Caution About "Reforming the System" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1169.html Self-Selected Vetting vs. Peer Review: Supplement or Substitute? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2340.html See also: "Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1583.html While I fully agree with Stevan that we need to proceed with OA given what we have immediately, and not wait for all the nuances to be perfected, I would like to second Ted's suggestion that "full green" be reserved for publishers who provide the final pdf version of an article for OA archiving and Open Access, according to the BOAI definition: By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml While intermediary steps, as Stevan points out, are most welcome and a huge improvement over not having access, it is important to recognize that the final, peer-reviewed version is the ideal. If there is no problem at all with having people access preprints rather than final published versions, then perhaps the practices of peer review and editing need to be rethought. A great deal of time and money go into these practices; if the OA versions are used more, and many do reflect the reviewing and editing - why bother? There could be arguments that there are more efficient means of peer review in this day and age. Send a message to this listserv, for example, and there seems to be a very high probability that it will be thoroughly and publicly reviewed, with counter-arguments often quickly provided by other participants. Could having everyone working in a reasonably narrowly defined area share in a listserv, with editorial commenting duties revolving perhaps, with research results shared first through the list, then posted to a final archive after confirmation by an authority selected by this group of colleagues that any necessary changes have been made? Couldn't a system like this be an extremely cost-efficient way to make use of the fact that the great majority of this work is done on a voluntary basis? As for authors making their own corrections, the results (quality of what people are reading) is unknown at this point in time. We don't know whether authors will actually make the corrections, how accurate they will be (possible sources of error ranging from simple copying problems to disagreement with reviewers and editors and refusal to make suggested changes), or whether authors might decide, in the course of making corrections, to include additional changes such as updating - which might provide new, useful information, but could also add sources of error, if the author is adding information that really should have been submitted for peer review. These kinds of issues are likely highly variable from discipline to discipline - physics does seem to be doing very well with OA preprints, for example, whereas in some areas of the social sciences where there is tremendous potential for bias on the part of a researcher, peer review is probably much more important. cheers, Heather G. Morrison Project Coordinator BC Electronic Library Network ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Phone: 604-268-7001 Fax: 604-291-3023 Email: [email protected] Web: http://www.eln.bc.ca On 10-Aug-04, at 1:29 AM, Ted Bergstrom wrote:
I have been wondering about the same issue that concerns Barbara Quint in the message quoted below. It seems to me much more satisfactory if an open archive contains an exact copy of the publisher's pdf version. Two good reasons for allowing this approach are accuracy of the scholarly record and convenience for authors. It seems to me that publishers should be given a stronger incentive to permit putting the publisher's pdf in their institutional archive. At least one commercial publisher already allows this, so it is not beyond possibilities that others could be induced to. Wouldn't it be a good idea for Sherpa and the scholarly community to distinguish between "full green" publishers who do allow self-archiving the pulisher's pdf version, and "pale green" for those who allow the author to prepare her own pdf version of the final copy? If self-archiving does catch on, authors are likely to find it important that they can archive exact copies of their final version. Accordingly, publishers who want to attract good authors will be under some pressure to accommodate this desire. Might it also be a good idea for archives to develop a convention that makes it clear when an archived copy is an exact replica of the published version? Ted BergstromDo the "green light" publishers send digital copies back to the authors? [Some give the green light for the author to use the publisher's PDF version, others only to use the author's own digital version.] http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers.html As an editor, I'm assuming that some of the text has been changed as it goes through the editorial process. [Correct, especially from unrefereed preprint to refereed postprint.] http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#What-is-Eprint So are the self-archives of the edited "final" versions or of the author's initial submissions? [If the green light is for the refereed, edited final version, that is what is self-archived; otherwise the preprint plus corrections.] http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#copyright1 Or would there be more than one version, e.g. an author's edition (like a director's cut video) that includes portions that didn't appear in the "printed" article as well as the published one? [Authors can self-archive all signitificant stages of their work, including pospublication corrections, updates and enhancements. The essential target of OA, though, is contents of the peer-reviewed final draft.] http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#23.Versionthat's what i thought. a librarian's/archivist's nightmare.-- bq [But a researcher's dream. -- SH]
