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Serials – 20(3), November 2007 Stephen Pinfield Can repositories and journals coexist? Can open access repositories and peer-reviewed journals coexist? Based on a paper presented at the 30th UKSG Conference,Warwick,April 2007 It is often assumed that open access repositories and peer-reviewed journals are in competition with each other and therefore will in the long term be unable to coexist. This paper takes a critical look at that assumption. It draws on the available evidence of actual practice which indicates that coexistence is possible at least in the medium term. It discusses possible future models of publication and dissemination which include open access, repositories, peer review and journals. The paper suggests that repositories and journals may coexist in the long term but that both may have to undergo significant changes. Important areas where changes need to occur include: widespread deployment of repository infrastructure, development of version identification standards, development of value-added features, new business models, STEPHEN PINFIELD new approaches to quality control and adoption of digital preservation as Chief Information Officer a repository function. University of Nottingham Introduction It is often assumed that open access (OA) management of digital objects, and where those repositories and peer-reviewed journals are in objects can than be freely and immediately accessed competition. In this competitive situation, it is and reused in an unrestricted way. Repositories suggested, coexistence in the long term will be may be maintained by and serve different com- impossible and only one of the two will exist in the munities, such as institutions or subject groupings. scholarly communication environment. However, They may also hold different types of content, this paper takes a critical look at that assumption including copies of research papers, digital learning by addressing the question: objects, theses and data. This paper will concentrate primarily on the first of these, copies of research Are repositories and journals necessarily in papers, sometimes referred to as ‘e-prints’. E-prints competition? are electronic copies of journal articles and similar In order to answer this, the paper also addresses a research outputs. They may take the form of number of sub-questions: ‘preprints’ (versions of papers before they have been refereed) or ‘postprints’ (versions of papers Is there any current empirical evidence of either which include changes made in response to competition or coexistence? referees’ comments, normally in the format What are the implications of this evidence for the produced by the author). short, medium and long term? What possible future publishing and dissemination models are there for repositories and journals which Empirical evidence might involve coexistence? This paper adopts the working definition of an Perhaps some of the most important empirical open access repository as a set of systems and evidence relating to the question of the relation- services which facilitates the ingest, storage and ship between repositories and journals is provided 163 Can repositories and journals coexist? Stephen Pinfield Serials – 20(3), November 2007 by services that already exist and have been subscriptions for this reason. Subscription movements operating for some time. The arXiv repository is for the journals they publish in the areas covered by a prominent example of this. As it has been in arXiv are no different from those of their journals in existence since 1991, it provides ‘real life’ evidence other areas of physics over the period. Moreover, both for a particular set of disciplines (physics, societies say that they do not view arXiv as a threat mathematics, computer science and quantitative to their business (rather the opposite, in fact) and this biology). It now holds over 415,000 papers and in is underlined by the fact that the APS helped key areas (high energy physics, astrophysics, and establish an arXiv mirror site at the Brookhaven condensed matter) includes copies of a large National Laboratory – hardly the action of a society proportion of the available journal literature, with its back to the wall because of that repository. which is in both the form of ‘preprints’ and Now it is true that there are only a couple of ‘postprints’. experiments of this sort carried out so far (physics So how has arXiv affected peer-reviewed journals? and computer science), where publishers have to co- Two major areas need to be examined: usage and exist with a successful open access archive, and so subscriptions. there is always the possibility that there is something Recent data on usage has been produced by of a ‘special case’ about this example. Quite what Edwin H Henneken et al1. In the area of might make it such a special case has never been Astrophysics they analysed papers first made adequately argued, but it is a finite possibility. available as e-prints in August 2004 and then Nevertheless, the evidence there is to hand points to published in four core peer-reviewed journals. the likelihood that the peaceful – and perhaps They looked at ‘reads’ per paper for the period mutually beneficial – co-existence of traditional between August 2004 and June 2006 from arXiv journals and open access archives is entirely possible; and the NASAAstrophysics Data System (ADS) on in biological terms, mutualism, rather than parasitism the one hand and the journals on the other. Their or symbiosis, might best describe the relationship.’ data shows clearly that the usage of material in Data presented by Andrew Wray3 of the Institute repositories is concentrated in the period before of Physics (IOP) to the OAI 5 conference seems to formal publication of the journal article. Once an concur with Swan’s conclusions. Wray shows that article is formally published, most usage switches data gathered by the IOP indicates that arXiv is not to the journal site. The ‘half life’ of an e-print (the having any major impact on IOP journal subscrip- period of time it takes for usage to fall to a half of tions. He also outlines ways in which the IOP its highest point) is very short. ‘The typical users is working with arXiv to create new innovative prefer to read the journal article when this becomes services (including www.eprintsweb.org) for available’, they state. This is a situation of physicists. coexistence, rather than competition. They The evidence that subscription patterns of conclude: relevant journals have not been significantly ‘This is good news for the publishers. Eprints have affected during the lifetime of arXiv reinforces the not undermined journal use in the astrophysics evidence that usage patterns of journals and arXiv community and thus do not pose a threat to the seem to be complementary. The data points to journal readership.’ coexistence rather than competition, at least for the medium term. Published data on subscriptions is a little harder Swan’s question of whether or not arXiv is a to come by, but what there is in the public domain ‘special case’ does, however, require consideration. also points towards coexistence rather than Because of the significance of arXiv, various competition. In a study on the open access attempts have been made to try to define how high repositories, Alma Swan2 states: energy physics in particular is a unique discipline ‘... we asked the American Physical Society (APS) and therefore how arXiv might be a special case. It and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) has been suggested, for example, that physicists what their experiences have been over the 14 years who use arXiv are a small community of that arXiv has been in existence. We asked how many researchers who tend to work in teams and cluster subscriptions have been lost as a result of arXiv. Both around a small number of large pieces of scientific societies said they could not identify any losses of equipment (such as the facilities at CERN). The 164 Serials – 20(3), November 2007 Stephen Pinfield Can repositories and journals coexist? argument is put that this community values peer- The Netherlands, are just beginning to show signs reviewed journals less than other subject of critical mass. It is getting difficult to maintain a communities since formal peer review itself is less meaningful special-case argument for arXiv in the important to its members. Most researchers, it is context of these developments. suggested, know each other personally (or at least However, other lines of evidence are more by reputation), and therefore have less need for the equivocal. Survey data on the attitudes of key filtering and quality assurance that peer review stakeholders in the scholarly communication chain provides. These factors, it is argued, make arXiv is an example of this. Mark Ware4, Chris Beckett a special case. However, these arguments are and Simon Inger5 have provided evidence on the questionable on a number of levels. To begin with, attitudes of librarians both of which point to it is clear that arXiv is used by more people considerable uncertainty in the profession about than just high energy physicists carrying out these issues and their future impact. Ware reports experiments on large-scale equipment. Many that although OA repositories are not currently theoretical physicists and astronomers in a wide considered to be a substitute for journals, 53% of range of institutions use it. This fact tends to respondents (rising to 81% in five years) indicate undermine the argument that arXiv is only used by that content in repositories would be an important a small tightly-knit community. Furthermore, data (or very important) factor in determining journal produced by Henneken et al demonstrates that cancellations. Beckett and Inger report a number of arXiv users are interested in peer review. They key conclusions: make extensive use of peer-reviewed journal articles ‘As many as 40% [of respondents] believe that in preference to e-prints when the articles become libraries are wasting their money subscribing to available.

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