[1604.05363] Comparing Published Scientific Journal Articles to Their Pre-print Versions

abernard102@gmail.com 2016-04-23

Summary:

[Abstract] Academic publishers claim that they add value to scholarly communications by coordinating reviews and contributing and enhancing text during publication. These contributions come at a considerable cost: U.S. academic libraries paid $1.7 billion for serial subscriptions in 2008 alone. Library budgets, in contrast, are flat and not able to keep pace with serial price inflation. We have investigated the publishers' value proposition by conducting a comparative study of pre-print papers and their final published counterparts. This comparison had two working assumptions: 1) if the publishers' argument is valid, the text of a pre-print paper should vary measurably from its corresponding final published version, and 2) by applying standard similarity measures, we should be able to detect and quantify such differences. Our analysis revealed that the text contents of the scientific papers generally changed very little from their pre-print to final published versions. These findings contribute empirical indicators to discussions of the added value of commercial publishers and therefore should influence libraries' economic decisions regarding access to scholarly publications.

Link:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.05363

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.studies oa.preprints oa.libraries oa.librarians oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.economics_of oa.budgets oa.versions

Date tagged:

04/23/2016, 07:52

Date published:

04/23/2016, 05:38