Re: Question about open access and print

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

Dear Richard,

The prospective publisher is right.

You are contemplating dual publication, and the sequence you 
propose is regarded by librarians somewhere between a nuisance 
and a disaster. If the papers were published in a formal journal, 
OA or not, electronic or not, they have been published.  if the 
submissions to the conference are peer reviewed, and in most good 
conferences they are, they have been published in a peer-reviewed 
journal, and further publication is unnecessary.

If those attending the conference wish a fancy book as a 
rememberance, they are perfectly free to pay for vanity 
publication, but there is no reason anyone else need bother.  No 
library will deliberately buy it. Those that buy it by accident, 
generally because the publisher advertisements delibrately do not 
mention the duplication, often warn other librarians on 
appropriate subject lists.

There are better ways. Many scientists do not regard most 
conference publications as formal publications, and post only the 
slides. They then prepare a more elaborate if less colorful 
paper, with a proper review of the literature [etc.], and submit 
it to a journal under a slightly different title to avoid 
confusion, mentioning that some of the material was previously 
presented at a conference. The reviewers will probably check, and 
if too much of the data has been previously presented with the 
same graphs, will reject the paper.

Alternatively, if the conference does have a formal proceedings 
with all the papers, which is properly indexed by the A&I 
services, why would one try to publish the same paper in a 
journal as well?

Most will publish a different paper for a journal, typically with 
additional data, that will refer to the conference but does not 
duplicate it. People with a great deal of data sometimes assort 
them in ways that are diffcult to fathom, but a journal referee 
should insist on some clarity here as well.

Peer review has many uses, and preventing duplicate publication 
is certainly one.

This has nothing to do with open access. I would not acquire a 
book that duplicated a journal whether or not one or both is OA. 
My practice when such was encountered was to not buy the book, 
and also cancel the journal, figuring that if it had to go to 
such lengths to get content, the content was unlikely to be of 
much value.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
and formerly
Princeton University Library

dgoodman@liu.edu
dgoodman@princeton.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: Richard Feinman <RFeinman@downstate.edu>
Date: Tuesday, February 28, 2006 6:22 pm
Subject: Question about open access and print
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu

> Consider the following scenario:
>
> You are the organizer of a scholarly conference and you publish
> the individual talks in an open access journal like, say
> Nutrition & Metabolism.  You now want to publish a hard bound
> edition where the individual papers are brought together with
> some connecting copy and introductions to individual articles.
> Although a prospective publisher believes you when you tell them
> that popular books do better when they are available online, they
> are concerned that libraries will not buy a book where the
> content is already available, Since it is a scholarly conference
> and they are an academic publisher, they are more concerned with
> library sales than individual sales.  To what extent are their
> fears justified?  Would members of the list not buy a book for
> their library if content were already online?
>
> Along the same lines, if a journal is published free on line and
> there is
> a charge only for the print edition, to what extent does this affect
>
> Is this a factor in the further evolution of open access?
>
> Regards, RF