While those of us managing and administering institutional repositories on a daily basis are familiar with the term 'postprint' and what it covers, the academics to whom we are trying to advocate our services are not. If I were to ask an academic new to self-archiving for the postprint of their paper, they would more than likely send me the publisher's PDF because, literally speaking, that is the post-print. In fact, many academics I have spoken to who have been self-archiving for some time still do not understand why we insist on calling a version that hasn't been printed, or at least isn't in print form, a 'postprint'. Many of the points raised by academics when explaining why they don't self-archive in their institution's repository revolve around it taking too much time and it being too confusing. Ambiguous terminology fuels that fire and I wonder have we been shooting ourselves in the foot by sticking to our guns on this one?
Colin Smith Research Repository Manager Open University, UK -----Original Message----- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: 30 September 2008 19:38 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Author's final draft and citing On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 1:26 PM, Sally Morris (Morris Associates) <[email protected]> wrote: > Setting aside for the moment all arguments about who should do > what with which versions, it would be an excellent idea if all players > started using the standard terminology for different article versions, > as advocated by NISO - see http://www.niso.org/publications/rp/. > > The term 'postprint' is particularly confusing, and should be > abandoned forthwith, IMHO! One wonders whose interests it would serve if we were to act in accordance with Sally's HO: the worldwide research community's or the worldwide publisher community's (including NISO's)? "Preprint" means the unrefereed draft of a paper and "Postprint" means the refereed draft (accepted for publication). http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#What-is-Eprint "Postprint" covers both the author's final, accepted draft and the publisher's proprietary PDF. But, as I pointed out -- and that was the whole point of my posting -- for purposes of research and researcher usage, the critical watershed is peer review: The postprint is anything past that watershed. Further distinctions among postprints are irrelevant to Open Access as well as to questions about citation: Cite the published work, and access whichever postprint you can access. Dixit. Stevan Harnad --------------------------------- The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).
