RE: Article on arXiv

["Matt Hodgkinson" <matt.hodgkinson@biomedcentral.com>]

Anne, that's a very interesting study. To me it appears that HEP 
is a very special case in scholarly communication - the 
researchers have no regard for peer review. If articles are 
already cited before publication of the peer reviewed article, 
this seems to indicate that in HEP peer review is entirely 
cosmetic. There is a blip upwards in citations of about 0.15 
citations per article per month immediately upon publication, 
which does indicate some remaining effect of journal publication, 
but this increase is gone within 12 months.

Is my impression correct: could the dissemination of research 
output in HEP be done entirely without peer review? What 
alternatives to peer review exist for assessing the accuracy and 
worth of individual articles in this community - email lists, 
blogs, conferences?

I would be horrified if the same culture were to dominate in 
biology or medicine. The potential damage caused by flawed and 
biased work being cited and disseminated with no checks is 
massive. There are some avenues for releasing work without peer 
review, such as Philica or Nature Precedings, but neither is 
well-known or respected and Nature Precedings deliberately does 
not allow the deposit of clinical studies.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Anne
Gentil-Beccot
Sent: 02 July 2009 05:31
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Article on arXiv

Dear Colleagues,

Following the recent interest on arXiv and its role in scholarly
communication in High Energy Physics, we would like to draw your
attention to a study we have just submitted to arXiv.

Best regards,

---
Anne Gentil-Beccot
CERN Library
CH-1211 Geneva 23
Anne.Gentil-Beccot@cern.ch

-------------------------------------------------------------

arXiv:0906.5418
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:45:04 GMT   (929kb)

Title: Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics. How a
Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love
Repositories

Authors: Anne Gentil-Beccot, Salvatore Mele, Travis Brooks
Categories: cs.DL
Report-no: CERN-OPEN-2009-007, SLAC-PUB-13693

Contemporary scholarly discourse follows many alternative routes 
in addition to the three-century old tradition of publication in 
peer-reviewed journals. The field of High- Energy Physics (HEP) 
has explored alternative communication strategies for decades, 
initially via the mass mailing of paper copies of preliminary 
manuscripts, then via the inception of the first online 
repositories and digital libraries. This field is uniquely placed 
to answer recurrent questions raised by the current trends in 
scholarly communication: is there an advantage for scientists to 
make their work available through repositories, often in 
preliminary form? Is there an advantage to publishing in Open 
Access journals? Do scientists still read journals or do they use 
digital repositories?

The analysis of citation data demonstrates that free and 
immediate online dissemination of preprints creates an immense 
citation advantage in HEP, whereas publication in Open Access 
journals presents no discernible advantage. In addition, the 
analysis of clickstreams in the leading digital library of the 
field shows that HEP scientists seldom read journals, preferring 
preprints instead. \\ (http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.5418