RE: Roundtable Press Release (Access to Research Results)

["Sally Morris" <sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk>]

I wonder whether any journal editors/copy-editors who follow this 
list have noticed any/growth in citations to drafts when 
published versions are available?  I can't say I did in my 3 
years editing 'Learned Publishing'

Sally Morris
Email: sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Sandy Thatcher
Sent: 21 January 2010 01:05
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Roundtable Press Release (Access to Research Results)

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