I agree that the postprint will fulfil most of what the published article
provides. But there is one thing which is quite essential, and which has
sofar mainly been provided by the final versions of papers published
in scientific journals. That is the page numbers used for reference
when citing works. In many cases scholarly citing needs more precision
than merely citing an article (or worse, a book) as a whole. If the
referencing is not sufficiently precise, this will hamper the process
of peer criticism, which is an essential aspect of science.
Greater availability of pre- and postprints (and the speed-up involved,
which I believe to be a great benefit to the process of science) will
presumably increase the wish to refer to these in other papers. Since
pre- and postprints will typically have other page numbers (if any)
than the published article, referring to the pre- and postprints may
obfuscate the scientific communication. This will probably be of less
importance in some disciplines than in others, due to differences in
the form of scholarly writing.
New technology and new conventions for scholarly writing may well provide
new answers to this potential referencing problem. In fully electronic
journals that utilize the power of the html format, for instance,
one solution is to number paragraphs instead of pages. The point is
that there is a need for adaquate standards of referencing and that
the existing standards are challenged by the changes involved in the
development towards open access (which I fully support). Therefore we
need to address this issue in the open access movement.
Kind regards
Hugo Alroe
> -----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
> Fra: Stevan Harnad [mailto:harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk]
> Sendt: 29. oktober 2003 13:27
> Til: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
> Emne: Re: Distinguishing the Essentials from the Optional Add-Ons
>
> On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, Chris Korycinski wrote:
>
> Re:
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3115.html
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/att-3115/01-0Licence.PDF
>
> > the next faq from Nature says that 'you may not distribute the
> > PDF... on open archives'. So presumably you can still keep _your_
> > version of the article on an open archive, but not the one which was
> > published in Nature.
>
> That does not matter *in the least*! The publisher's proprietary PDF
> contains added-values to be sure, but I am betting (and please stay
> tuned!), that the the only thing researchers really want and
> need is the peer-reviewed final draft.
Received on Thu Oct 30 2003 - 14:36:24 GMT