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

["Sally Morris \(ALPSP\)" <sally.morris@alpsp.org>]

Maybe we need more information about the actual size of the 
access problem. Publishers tend, I think, to report fairly low 
levels of 'turnaways' - those who try to access full text but 
can't.  If any publishers reading this can contribute figures, 
that would be useful.

A very, very small percentage of accesses to BMJ's free research 
articles are from patients and the general public;  see 
http://miranda.ingentaconnect.com/vl=6377737/cl=15/tt=885/ini=alpsp/nw=1/fm=docpdf/rpsv/cw/alpsp/09531513/v16n3/s1/p163.

In OUP's recent study of NAR 
(http://www.oxfordjournals.org/news/oa_report.pdf) only eight to 
twelve percent of increased access was attributable to its going 
OA;  far, far more was due to opening up to search engine 
crawlers.


Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
Email:  sally.morris@alpsp.org

----- 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
> American Scientist Open Access Forum
> http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html