Re: arXiv (RE: Why Cornell's Institutional Repository Is Near-Empty)

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

It seems to me that Alma has come up with some very important 
information which she has (as mentioned) put foward before and 
which intrigued me then. Unlike some postings I find this too 
concise to be of evidential value. Is there any chance that she 
(you) might consider publishing this study in a peer reviewed 
journal?

Anthony

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alma Swan" <a.p.swan@talk21.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Monday, March 26, 2007 1:55 AM
Subject: RE: arXiv (RE: Why Cornell's Institutional Repository Is
Near-Empty)

> Rick Anderson wrote:
>
> > Yes, but these are preprints, correct?  If arXiv is hosting the
> > complete postprint contents of any physics journal (without
> > embargo), please let me know so I can cancel my library
> > subscription to that title.
> Presumably physics subject librarians around the world know the
> answer to your second point.
>
> I can answer your first point, though, and provide some other
> pertinent figures regarding arXiv:
>
> 1. First, (the same figures that I posted to this list last
> November) on the content of arXiv:
>
> When we checked this in September 2005 the numbers of articles in
> arXiv were:
>
> Total records: 336829
> Those with a complete journal reference: 173901
> Those with an annotation saying "Accepted": 15772
>
> i.e. around 56% of articles have postprint status.
>
> A further 14539 have an annotation saying "Submitted" and may be
> pre- or post- peer review.
>
> The rest have no discernible status and must in most cases be
> preprints.
>
> 2. Nature Physics
>
> I only did this exercise once, for the very first issue of this
> journal, and it would be worth repeating on subsequent issues. I
> carried it out because Nature had recently introduced a 6-month
> embargo on self-archiving and I wanted to see how that would be
> handled by the physics community. On the day Issue 1 was
> published in October 2005, I searched three sources for articles
> that appeared in the issue - arXiv, Google (Google Scholar wasn't
> around at that time) and author websites. The results were:
>
> Letters to Nature Physics (6 in total):
> 2 with postprints in arXiv
> 2 with preprints in arXiv (one of these also had Nature's own PDF on the
> author's home page)
> 2 not in arXiv (but one of these had Nature's own PDF on the author's home
> page)
>
> Articles (2 in total):
> 2 postprints in arXiv
>
> I defined an article in arXiv as a POSTPRINT if it gave the
> Nature Physics page numbers, or said 'to appear in Nature
> Physics', i.e. it had been accepted for publication.
>
> So only one paper out of 8 was not freely available on the web
> somewhere immediately upon publication. In fact, they were there
> before publication but of course I had to wait for the Issue 1
> ToC before I could carry out the exercise.
>
> Regarding how far before publciation they were available in
> arXiv, the dates of depositing the four postprints (remember that
> the journal publication date was the beginning of October) are
> shown below. The figures in brackets after them show the usage
> activity of those articles from arXiv - as measured by Citebase -
> by 5th October, i.e. nominally two or three days after official
> publication, in the format [number of citations, number of
> full-text downloads]: 11 March [1,10] 27 June [5,11] 26 July
> [0,3] 26 September [3,20]
>
> The 2 preprints had also been read and cited by the time of publication,
> too:
> i) [3,24]
> ii) [0,2]
>
> Alma Swan
> Key Perspectives Ltd
> Truro, UK