The exchange copied at the end of this posting prompted me to ask this
question:
Why hasn't APS offered its authors, at a fair price, a valuable service
that all would want and many would buy--namely, the service of posting an
author's APS-formatted article on arXiv?
[Currently authors sign a copyright agreement that denies them the right to
do this themselves.]
The advantage to the authors would be that the paper-archived version of
their refereed articles would be on arXiv, and they (the authors) would be
relieved of the bother of having to prepare and post their own
less-attractive and less-authentic versions of their final paper if they
wanted users of arXiv to directly access it.
[Authors can already post the APS-formatted version on their own home
pages, but as Andrew Odlyzko has documented, _any_ impediment to access
reduces the use of information (The Rapid Evolution of Scholarly
Communication
http://www.catchword.com/alpsp/09531513/v15n1/contp1-1.htm),
and, as Stevan continually reminds us, attention to their articles is what
authors of the journal literature want.]
The advantage to APS would be that it would be making money from providing
a service for which many authors would be willing to pay a fair
price. (Currently a fair price should be quite low; Entomological Society
of America [ESA] prices a similar service for 75% the price of 100 reprints.)
That such a service might be popular is suggested by these data: for the
latest issues of two of ESA's journals (Environmental Entomology and
Journal of Economic Entomology), 64% of authors thought it worthwhile to
pay for immediate free Web access to their refereed, ESA-formatted articles
(
http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/epub/ESAepub.htm). [If ESA succeeds
in having its immediate-free-access articles immediately accessible through
PubMed Central, its service will become even more comparable to what is
suggested above for APS .]
If APS has not yet asked its members whether they favor or oppose APS
offering the service described above, perhaps it should.
Tom Walker
At 07:59 PM 12/19/2001 +0000, you wrote:
>On Tue, 18 Dec 2001 Arthur P. Smith <apsmith_at_APS.ORG> wrote:
>
> > if publishing free literature really involved no copy-editing, we would
> > likely never do it, as a publisher with a historical interest in certain
> > publication standards.... Just my opinion, really...
> > The society has stated goals to "advance and diffuse the knowledge
> > of physics" which is more about publishing quality "content" than
> > "doing peer review". We [APS] manage the peer review as part of
> > publishing journals of course, that's how we determine what's worth
> > putting in our journals. But if the journals ceased to really mean
> > anything in terms of improved presentation of the content, I
> > suspect we would just sell the business to whoever wanted it;
> > Elsevier probably.
>
>It's my opinion that in this case Arthur's opinion does not
>represent the APS (Marty?)... It think that if the Physics
>community should ever decide that all it wants/needs is peer
>review, APS will then faithfully provide that, rather than
>ceding the titles...
>
>In any case, the extent to which copy-editing is worth paying
>for, over and above peer review, is surely something the
>market could decide, once the online access to the peer-reviewed
>draft was free. (APS is generously freeing access even to its
>proprietary, copy-edited drafts, by allowing its authors to
>self-archive them, although this rather moots the market decision!
>http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/APS/copy_trnsfr.pdf )
>
>Stevan Harnad
============================================
Thomas J. Walker
Department of Entomology & Nematology
PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive)
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620
E-mail: tjw_at_ufl.edu (or tjwalker_at_mail.ifas.ufl.edu)
FAX: (352)392-0190
Web:
http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
============================================
Received on Thu Dec 20 2001 - 16:29:53 GMT