On Wed, 5 Jul 2006, Anthony Watkinson wrote:
I suppose Professor Harnad thinks that if he constantly
promulgates the idea (see below) that the only difference
between the accepted paper and the final published version is
a matter of formatting he will get those not involved in
publishing to accept this as a "fact". In fact there is
something called "copyediting". There are some publishers who
do very little copy-editing or even none at all. However many
publishers, especially those who have important journals, do a
lot of copy-editing which is not just a matter of house style
but can pick up serious errors. The difference between the
versions can be significant and this difference is (I
understand) being recognised by the current NISO groups
working on version. Journal editors of course know this very
well too.
The trouble is that Anthony Watkinson and I are addressing two
completely different problems, hence two completely different
user populations.
Mr. Watkinson is thinking of the user who has a subscription to
the journal, with its copy-edited, proofed PDF, and is weighing
the use of this against the use of the author's final, accepted
draft -- revised and accepted, but not copy-edited. He is quite
right that the copy-edited version is to be preferred: I too
would prefer it, if I had access to it.
But the problem I -- and the OA movement -- are addressing is
not that one at all. We are concerned with the population of
would-be users who cannot, today, access the journal version,
because it is not in one of the journals they or their
institutions can afford to subscribe to. And the choice *they*
are facing is access to the author's final, refereed, accepted
(but not copy-edited) draft, versus no access at all. I very
much doubt that all those would-be users would be very
appreciative of Mr. Watkinson's concern to protect them from
access to the author's final draft on the grounds of potential
errors that might arise from the lack of copy-editing.
I think Mr. Watkinson may have both the immediate needs of
researchers and the immediate motivation for Open Access rather
out of focus and proportion if he imagines that his very
legitimate scholarly concern to minimize all errors that a
copy-editor might catch carries any weight at all in the
context of the overarching research concern that would-be users
should not continue to be denied access to the final, refereed
drafts of research findings.
And if Mr. Watkinson is curious about the size and scope of
this would-be user population, and of the research access
problem that the OA movement is addressing (compared to the
copy-editing error-risk problem that he is addressing), a good
estimate is provided by the 25%-250% higher citation impact of
research for which the author supplements access to the journal
version by self-archiving his final draft in his institutional
repository. That's quite a dramatic difference, but I expect it
will prove to be even bigger, once we have not only citation
data, but also usage (download) data comparing self-archived
and non-self-archived articles (in the same journal and year).
If anyone has any comparative data on the research impact of
undetected copy-editing errors, I would be very happy to see
it...
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html