With apologies for cross-posting
Recent claims made by some of those who advocate the mandatory deposit of
published articles in institutional and subject repositories prompt us to
correct and clarify the relationship between physics journals and the
physics e-print archive (arXiv).
It has been claimed that because physics publishers have co-existed with
the arXiv over the past 14 years, publishers have nothing to fear about
the future. We take the opportunity to point out that the past is not
always a good predictor of future performance.
Ever since the launch of the physics e-print archive in 1991, authors
publishing in IOP Publishing journals have had the choice to post their
preprints to the service. However, we do note that article downloads from
our site are significantly lower for those journals whose content is
substantially replicated in the arXiv repository than for those which are
not, after usage statistics have been normalized to take account of
journal size.
Usage statistics (e.g., ProjectCOUNTER) are now increasingly used as a
'value for money' measure in the library community and elsewhere. Clearly,
as usage statistics become more commonplace, it would be only natural for
cash-strapped librarians to conclude that subscriptions to low-use ?
albeit high-quality, peer-reviewed ? journals are no longer necessary. In
this situation subscription-based journals published by a learned society
such as ourselves would become economically unviable.
Ken Lillywhite
Business Director
Institute of Physics Publishing
Institute of Physics
Registered charity No. 293851
76 Portland Place, London, W1B 1NT, England
IOP Publishing Limited
Registered in England under Registration No 467514.
Registered Office: Dirac House, Temple Back, Bristol BS1 6BE England
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