RE: Study Identifies Factors that Could Lead to Journal Cancellations

["David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>]

Anthony

I had a vague memory that somebody had carried out a study to 
show that many authors were actually updating their pre-prints in 
arXiv to also provide the final, post-print version.  I couldn't 
find what I was looking for, but came across this presentation 
given by John Haynes of IoPP last year:

http://www.alpsp.org/events/2005/PPR/haynes.ppt#2

In it he states that in 'High energy physics and astrophysics 
journals' there is 'Almost 100% overlap between what is published 
in the journal and a version of that article on arXiv' and 
'Authors tend to update their arXiv version with most current' 
(slide 5).  He also says 'Versions available on arXiv are 
scientifically very similar to, if not identical to published 
versions' (slide 10).  So, if John is correct (and I suspect he 
knows much more about this than we do) it would appear that arXiv 
contains both pre- and post-prints for a large proportion of the 
papers we are talking about.

John does go on to say that it would be 'Wise to be concerned 
about how cash-strapped libraries will respond to a field that is 
well resourced with "near enough" versions of journal 
articles.especially true as librarians start to make more use of 
usage statistics (e.g. COUNTER)''.  He is, of course, entitled to 
be concerned, but there is no evidence that the libraries' 
response over the past 14 years of arXiv's existence has been to 
cancel any journals as a response to arXiv.

Best wishes

David C Prosser PhD
Director
SPARC Europe
E-mail:  david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Anthony Watkinson
Sent: 16 November 2006 07:07
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Study Identifies Factors that Could Lead to Journal
Cancellations

Heather Morrison may well be right but there is one point she 
makes and has made before which has to be challenged. ArChiv is 
populated by preprints and not by postprints on the whole.

Anthony