On 5-Oct-09, at 6:11 AM, Maarten van Bentum wrote:
> In my opinion the issue of the version has much to do with the speed
> of
> publication. One of the arguments to publish your article in an open
> access repository can be to have it as soon as possible open to the
> world, and especially for your collegues of the same discipline. But
> this is not of equal importance to every discipline. For instance in
> many beta-disciplines (and especially those with a preprint culture)
> speed of publication is important, so having an author version in a
> repository a couple of months before it is published in the journal,
> might be interesting for these authors. For most gamma and alfa
> disciplines speed is not interesting at all. In the end nearly all
> scientists prefer the publishers pdf because of the 'stamp'.
>
> In short, with respect to article versions I don't believe there is
> much
> difference between countries, but just between disciplines. And
> speed of
> publication (or access) is an important factor.
Open Access (OA) is not about speed of publication, and the version-
issue is trivial in the context of OA.
OA is about access, and this is equally true of fast- and slow-
turnaround disciplines. Would-be users whose institutions cannot
afford toll-access to the journal in which an article was published
have no access at all. The solution is to make all articles OA by
depositing the final, refereed draft in the author's OA IR immediately
upon acceptance for publication.
There are no disciplinary (or national) differences in the need for
access to research for which one's institution cannot afford
subscription access (although there are definitely national and even
disciplinary differences in the proportion of refereed research output
to which their potential users can afford subscription access).
The OA clock starts ticking on the date the final peer-reviewed draft
is accepted for publication. That is when OA's target content needs to
be made OA. Making unrefereed preprints OA even earlier is up to the
author, and will definitely vary from discipline to discipline (and
cannot and should not be mandated).
Insofar as speed of uptake and impact are concerned, those too will
vary by discipline, though it is probably true in general that the
earlier a finding is made accessible to all potential users, the
sooner it will be read, used, applied, built-upon, and cited (within
the temporal parameters of the discipline involved).
Stevan Harnad
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