Open access, Peer review (2) and pre-publication drafts
April 28, 2008
The last post has prompted some more, unformed but interesting thoughts about the ways in which the pressures of open-access publishing are re-shaping academic publications. UCL have recently introduced an ‘e-prints’ scheme, which aims to provide free, pre-publication copies of papers by UCL academics. Similarly, a number of researchers have taken to circumventing the firewalls of closed academic journal publishing by making pre-publication copies available online. Given that many of these papers turn up on Google Scholar, increasingly the main way of searching for papers, it is not inconceivable that they will achieve a much greater circulation than the actual published paper. While I’m in favour of open-access publishing, the ‘halfway house’ provided by publishing research articles in less than finished form seems to raise as many questions as it solves. If these papers are suitable for dissemination by the university, what then is the purpose of the journal review process? Who is to have the final say in what is worth publishing? University administrators or journal editors?
April 28, 2008 at 3:13 pm
In many (possibly most) cases the pre-prints are the fully peer reviewed articles. The “less than finished form” is that they don’t have specific page numbers/volume/issue information for the journal. The scientific content of these manuscripts is not at all different from that of the “real” article.
April 28, 2008 at 3:18 pm
It is not unrefereed drafts that researchers need, but refereed drafts. And that, for the most part, is what they are providing, free online. That’s also what their institutions and funders are mandating that they provide free online. It is not refereed journals nor the peer review system that needs reform, it is the access-provision system, and tat is entirely in the hands of researchers, their institutions and their funders.
Stevan Harnad
April 28, 2008 at 3:26 pm
I know that most journal pre-prints are simply awaiting space in the publication, and many’s the time I’ve appreciated being able to get hold of an article without having to wait for the publication cycle to come round. The Nature ‘preceedings’ site differs in that it explictly states that the papers are not peer-reviewed, as did the Genome Biology website. BioMedCentral’s preprints were described launched back in 1999 on the basis that “no peer-review approval will be required and information submitted will be the sole responsibility of the authors” (http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/presscenter/pressreleases?pr=19990426). UCL’s e-prints server, with which I’m most familiar, allows both peer-reviewed and non-peer reviewed pieces to be posted. Given the amount of energy that has been expended over the years exhorting people to wait for peer review before publicising scientific results, it seems ironic that Nature and other journals are themselves short-cutting the process