On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 2:36 PM, Klaus Graf <klausgraf_at_googlemail.com>
wrote:
2009/3/4 Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_gmail.com>:
>SH:
> Repository deposit is definitely not for papers that
cannot meet the
> peer-review standards of journals; the "preprint" is
not a preprint if it
> will never be acceptable to a journal.
KG:
(2) Repositories are not only for journal articles.
The query was, as was plain from what was asked, from someone who
had tried and and failed to meet the peer-review standards of the
several journals to which they had submitted their paper, and wanted
to know whether deposit in an OA repository like CogPrints would
count as a publication. I replied, quite correctly, that a repository
is not a publisher but an access-provider, hence it is not a
substitute for publishing. An unpublished paper, deposited in an OA
repository, remains an unpublished paper.
(3) OA isn't only for journal articles and scientific
data.
I stated in my reply that an OA IR isn't only for published
documents and data (which in some fields includes multimedia):
"An OA Repository is also a good way to provide
supplementary information about a published article; it
can also provide access to postpublication revisions, and
updates, and even unpublished commentaries on other
articles and commentaries -- but the rather is more like
blogging than formal publication.... In addition, before
publication, even before submission, one can deposit the
unrefereed "preprint: of the article in an OA Repository,
in order to elicit feedback as well as to establish
priority. The preprint too can be cited, as always, as
"unpublished manuscript", but its repository URL can be
added for access purposes."
You can put your diary and your family pictures in an OA IR too, but
that's not the reason OA IRs were created, and that is not the raison
d'ętre of the OA movement.
(4) Not all disciplines and countries have journals with
formal peer review.
And your point is?
Of course published books are welcome in OA IRs too, and so are
preprints of books to be published or submitted. Nor will (or should)
IRs try to legislate about whether a journal (or book) is refereed or
vanity-press. That's for the assessors of one's CV to judge. The
essence of the query was simply whether deposit of an unpublished
document thereby constitutes publication, eo ipso. And the reply was
that it does not.
Moreover, the query was about a Central Repository (for the cognitive
sciences), called CogPrints, and CogPrints is very specifically
reserved for papers that have been refereed or are being refereed. It
is not a repository for unpublishable documents, first, because
authors can put those on their own websites or on commercial
vanity-sites, and, second, because OA (at 15%) has not yet had
notable success in inducing authors to deposit OA's primary target
content, refereed journal articles. It does not enhance the
probability of capturing OA's primary target content if mostly empty
repositories today are instead filled with unpublished and
unpublishable "grey literature." (Once the mandates have done their
work, and OA's target content is reliably speeding toward 100%, the
superaddition of the grey literature -- and diaries and family photos
-- will do no harm; that's what metadata are there to sort out. But
right now, the just introduce noise where we need signal.)
(5) It is misleading to speak of "peer-review standards
of journals"
because they differ from journal to journal and
discipline to
discipline.
And your point is?
Stevan Harnad
Received on Wed Mar 04 2009 - 20:16:05 GMT