Re: "Accepted Manuscript"

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Which is exactly why I worry about initiatives like Harvard's and 
MIT's. Many people who are not familiar with the terminology or 
the practices that are now being pursued will wrongly assume that 
the posted version is the same as the published one and will rely 
on it when citing it in further scholarship, repeating errors 
that might have been caught in the copyediting or quoting 
material that was later edited to be more clearly expressed. This 
can really hurt scholarship as much as it helps dissemination. 
There is a tradeoff here. Am I the only one who worries about 
this?

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


>This version terminology question is a fascinating one.  Imagine
>how an author must feel when asked to navigate through a thicket
>that not even top scholarly communication professionals can
>neatly traverse. What version can he/she deposit in a repository
>or on a personal page while staying within the bounds a
>publisher's copyright agreement?
>
>Or picture the confusion within the mind of a researcher, perhaps
>an undergraduate or graduate student, as he/she struggles to
>determine whether the paper just downloaded from Google is the
>"actual article" or some lesser version.  We have created a bit
>of a bog here, an unfortunate byproduct of a perhaps noble
>attempt to increase access to information.  Efforts such as the
>NISO/ALPSP Working Group on Journal Article Versions are a good
>attempt to bring clarity to the issue, but I can't imagine the
>harried author or the inexperienced researcher has any real grasp
>of the definitional subtleties at this point.
>
>Ideally, we would consider affixing a canned definition on these
>repository files (e.g., "The following paper is the 'Accepted
>Manuscript' version.  It has been accepted for publication in a
>journal. Content and layout, follow publisher's submission
>requirements.").  However, I am not at all confident we can (a)
>get posting authors to understand the subtle distinctions between
>versions, and (b) get them to care enough to take the extra
>effort.  We are thus left with the prospect of adding another
>administrative level to the depositing protocol if we want to
>"fix" this.
>
>Best, Greg
>
>Greg Tananbaum
>Consulting Services at the Intersection of Technology, Content, & Academia
>(510) 295-7504
>greg@scholarnext.com
>http://www.scholarnext.com