Hi Frances and friends,
Discussion of versions of articles prompted me to look at arXiv to see how
many submissions have multiple versions *within* arXiv. This may be a
little tangential to the discussion but I thought I'd share the results
in case it is interesting:
We have stored all versions submitted since October 1997. Since then there
have been about 307k submissions, of which 96k (31%) have more than one
version [* breakdown of versions is appended below].
Of the 460k accesses to abstracts and full-text on the main arXiv site in
the first week of June 2006, just 0.3% specified an explicit version [**
details below]. Thus the overwhelming majority were accesses to the
"latest version".
Cheers,
Simeon
* Breakdown of counts of articles on arXiv with different number of
versions. Articles from 1997-10-01 to 2006-06-12 as of 2006-06-13.
highest
version count
1 210812
2 69654
3 19172
4 4921
5 1339
6 441
7 169
8 76
9 35
10 23
11 15
12 11
13 10
14 6
15 2
16 4
17 3
18 3
19 0
20+ 7
** Access to arXiv articles via an identifier without an explicit version
number takes the user to the latest version (e.g.
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9901001). The previous versions are linked
from this page. Accesses to a specific version are indicated by a version
number appended to the internal identifier (e.g. hep-th/9901001v2 instead
of hep-th/9901001, to make a URL like:
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9901001v2). Robots, admin and repeat downloads
have been removed to a good degree from these numbers.
On Tue, 13 Jun 2006, Frances Shipsey wrote:
> Hi Joanne, Patrick
>
> It's excellent to hear how CERN is going about getting all those papers
> in - very inspiring!
>
> On the question of identifying and differentiating different versions,
> the VERSIONS Project is currently asking researchers (in the field of
> economics) about their experience of finding multiple versions and/or
> copies of academic papers online.
>
> The survey (see http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/versions/surveys.html),
> which covers other aspects of version identification and use, is open
> for another couple of weeks, so figures given below are provisional.
> Responses so far indicate that:
>
> 94.3% of researchers (to date) find multiple versions/copies of articles
> online either Very Frequently (16.9%), Frequently (38.7%) or Sometimes
> (38.7%).
>
> 55.6% of survey respondents (to date) find it generally quick and easy
> to establish which version(s) they want to read, while a significant
> minority (39.8%) do not.
>
> We will be analysing the results in full when the survey closes and
> making recommendations about how repositories could identify different
> versions more clearly, based on what's important to authors and readers.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Frances Shipsey
> VERSIONS Project Manager
> Library
> London School of Economics and Political Science
> 10 Portugal Street
> London WC2A 2HD
>
> t: +44(0)20 7955 6915
> f: +44(0)20 7955 7454
> e: [log in to unmask]
> w: www.lse.ac.uk/versions
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