Re: Maximising research access vs. minimizing copy-editing errors

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>]

I rest my case. I am just making the point that the paper 
accepted by the editor of a journal is not the same as the paper 
published in the journal and that the difference is not just a 
matter of formatting. This is fact. We can all of us put this 
into a wider context but I would have thought that we had heard 
Professor Harnad's views very often. All his remarks are very 
splendid but this does not alter the incorrectness of the 
assertion I quoted.

Anthony Watkinson

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stevan Harnad" <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, July 07, 2006 12:27 AM
Subject: Maximising research access vs. minimizing copy-editing errors

> On Wed, 5 Jul 2006, Anthony Watkinson wrote:
>
>> I suppose Professor Harnad thinks that if he constantly
>> promulgates the idea (see below) that the only difference
>> between the accepted paper and the final published version is a
>> matter of formatting he will get those not involved in
>> publishing to accept this as a "fact". In fact there is
>> something called "copyediting". There are some publishers who
>> do very little copy-editing or even none at all. However many
>> publishers, especially those who have important journals, do a
>> lot of copy-editing which is not just a matter of house style
>> but can pick up serious errors. The difference between the
>> versions can be significant and this difference is (I
>> understand) being recognised by the current NISO groups working
>> on version. Journal editors of course know this very well too.
>
> The trouble is that Anthony Watkinson and I are addressing two
> completely different problems, hence two completely different
> user populations.
>
> Mr. Watkinson is thinking of the user who has a subscription to
> the journal, with its copy-edited, proofed PDF, and is weighing
> the use of this against the use of the author's final, accepted
> draft -- revised and accepted, but not copy-edited. He is quite
> right that the copy-edited version is to be preferred: I too
> would prefer it, if I had access to it.
>
> But the problem I -- and the OA movement -- are addressing is not
> that one at all. We are concerned with the population of would-be
> users who cannot, today, access the journal version, because it
> is not in one of the journals they or their institutions can
> afford to subscribe to. And the choice *they* are facing is
> access to the author's final, refereed, accepted (but not
> copy-edited) draft, versus no access at all. I very much doubt
> that all those would-be users would be very appreciative of Mr.
> Watkinson's concern to protect them from access to the author's
> final draft on the grounds of potential errors that might arise
> from the lack of copy-editing.
>
> I think Mr. Watkinson may have both the immediate needs of
> researchers and the immediate motivation for Open Access rather
> out of focus and proportion if he imagines that his very
> legitimate scholarly concern to minimize all errors that a
> copy-editor might catch carries any weight at all in the context
> of the overarching research concern that would-be users should
> not continue to be denied access to the final, refereed drafts of
> research findings.
>
> And if Mr. Watkinson is curious about the size and scope of this
> would-be user population, and of the research access problem that
> the OA movement is addressing (compared to the copy-editing
> error-risk problem that he is addressing), a good estimate is
> provided by the 25%-250% higher citation impact of research for
> which the author supplements access to the journal version by
> self-archiving his final draft in his institutional repository.
> That's quite a dramatic difference, but I expect it will prove to
> be even bigger, once we have not only citation data, but also
> usage (download) data comparing self-archived and
> non-self-archived articles (in the same journal and year).
>
> If anyone has any comparative data on the research impact of
> undetected copy-editing errors, I would be very happy to see
> it...
>
> Stevan Harnad