Re: Roundtable Press Release (Access to Research Results)

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

The key question, for me, is what "use" here means. If it means 
just consulting a draft version for the ideas and information it 
conveys in a general way, I'm sure that is no different from what 
has been going on forever in the world of scholarship. If it 
means citing the draft version in your own published article, 
then I'd say there is ground for concern. Proliferation of 
citations to drafts cannot be good for scholarship. This is not 
to say it doesn't, or never should, happen: one may think, for 
instance, of references to a paper delivered at an academic 
conference, which is usually not a peer-reviewed version. But the 
more that Green OA encourages people to be lazy and cite drafts 
instead of versions of record, the more scholarship will suffer.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press

>On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 9:42 AM, Sally Morris
<sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>>  Stevan asserts that researchers who cannot afford access to the
>>  published version of articles are perfectly happy with the
>>  self-archived author's final version.
>>
>>  Interestingly, in our survey of learned society members (see
>>  http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/2009308) Sue Thorn and I found that
>>  most of our 1368 respondents did not, in fact, use authors'
>>  self-archived versions even when they had no access to the
>>  published version - 53% never did so, and only 16% did so
>>  whenever possible.
>
>Sally does not always put her survey questions in the most
>perspicuous way:
>http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/512-guid.html
>http://bit.ly/4pMm9n
>
>If you really want to find out whether or not researchers are
>"happy" with the author's refereed, accepted final draft *when
>they lack access to the published version* you have to ask them
>that:
>
>(1) "How often do you encounter online, in a search or otherwise,
>the free author final draft of a potentially relevant article to
>which you (or your institution) cannot afford paid full-text
>access?"
>
>(2) "If you lack access to the published version of such a
>potentially relevant article, would you prefer to have no access
>at all, or access to the author's refereed, accepted final
>draft?"
>
>(3) "If you would prefer access to the author draft over no
>access at all, how strongly would you prefer it over no access at
>all?
>
>That's the forthright, transparent way to put the exact
>contingencies we are addressing. No equivocation or ambiguity.
>
>In contrast, I am sure that Sally's question about "How often do
>you use author drafts?" was just that: "How often do you use
>author drafts?" Not "How often do you encounter a potentially
>relevant article, but decline to use it because you only have
>access to the author draft and not the published version?"
>
>Sally's responses -- which seem to say that 47% do use the author
>draft and 53% do not use the author draft -- fail to reveal
>whether the 53% who fail to use the author draft indeed fail to
>do so because, even though they have found a potentially relevant
>author draft free online, and lack access to the publisher draft,
>they prefer to ignore the potentially relevant author draft (this
>would be very interesting and relevant news if it were indeed
>true), or simply because they happen to be among the 53% who had
>never encountered a potentially relevant author draft free online
>when they had no access to the publisher version. (And could the
>16% who did use the author draft "wherever possible" perhaps
>correspond to the well-known datum that only about 15% of all
>articles have freely accessible author drafts online)?
>
>Surveys that obscure these fundamental details under a cloud of
>ambiguity are not revealing researchers' preferences but their
>own.
>
>Stevan Harnad