Re: Leading academics back UK Research Councils on self-archiving

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 21:43:26 +0100

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 08:50:33 -0400
From: Michael Kurtz <kurtz_at_cfa.harvard.edu>
To: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>

Hi Stevan,

I thought I sent it to the group, but perhaps not.

In any event your note said much of what I said. I do not understand
how my saying complementary not competitive can be construed as
supporting the disruptive technology thesis.

Jean-Claude Guédon wrote:

>At the same time, one may puzzle as to why, when so many articles are
>already available in open access, the rate of use is so low.

I should make clear that my comparison was of use during July 2005 of
articles published during 2004 in the Astrophysical Journal. These
articles were published in 2003 and 2004 in astro_ph. The main use of
astro_ph, like almost every publication, is for newly published
articles. astro_ph is very heavily used in this manner, indeed it is
likely that the readership of any particular article is greater in the
~6 months it is only available as a preprint in the arXiv than it is in
the first couple of years it is available from the journal.

Because the main use of astro_ph is before the article is available from
the Astrophysical Journal, and after it is published the use is mainly
from the ApJ (for the same article) the two services are more
complementary than in competition.

-- 
Dr. Michael J. Kurtz
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
60 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
USA
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Received on Wed Aug 24 2005 - 21:50:13 BST

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