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Source link: http://archive.mises.org/10456/down-with-old-fashioned-publishing/

Down with old-fashioned publishing

August 13, 2009 by

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

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 iin the leading digital library of the field shows that HEP
scientists seldom read journals, preferring preprints instead.

{ 4 comments }

Les August 13, 2009 at 11:07 am

Jeffery:

It appears that you dropped part of your article.

Jeffrey Tucker August 13, 2009 at 11:11 am

fixed

Greg Ransom August 13, 2009 at 11:51 am

Don’t expect fake sciences like “mainstream” economics to work like real sciences like High Energy Physics. The incentives, the checks of reality, and sources of power and status are very different.

In philosophy there is an advantage to circulate your pre-print papers among a very select group of high-power insiders. In philosophy, sometimes papers are published for _decades_, and only the highest status and most powerful people in the profession every have access to the “pre-print”. This allows for a sort of oligopoly of knowledge among a select group of the most powerful departments and the most powerful individuals in the profession — and it locks others out of the conversation.

Greg Ransom August 13, 2009 at 11:53 am

Sorry, make that “In philosophy, sometimes papers are not published for _decades_ … “

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