Benefits and Problems Facing Them Preprint Servers Benefits and Problems Facing Them

Brief Description of Preprint Servers Electronically posted scholarly papers that are not owned by anyone but the author Usually archived in a searchable form by a university, professional society, or government agency Sometimes not officially peer-reviewed, but oftentimes an earlier version of a paper that will be published in a peer-reviewed paper or electronic journal. If this becomes the primary format of publications, benefits will increase.

Benefits of Preprint Servers Immediate dissemination of information through free (or significantly cheaper) electronic access for the reader. Quicker, easier and cheaper for the author/publisher as well. Ability to create direct links to audio, video, references, or genetic sequence data, eliminating costly graphics in print.

Potential Long-Term Consequences In-person communication and idea-generating between scholars may decrease as more electronic information is available without the time lag of “grey literature.” Divide between humanities and sciences may grow if archives become more specialized, separating disciplines even more.

Current Disadvantages Few large-scale efforts – each one could take months to years to attract many high quality authors. OAI is a start, but only that. Not only is there little coordination between multiple disciplines, but even among disciplines, different areas and queries can require different preprint servers, with no guides between them.

Disadvantages Continued Abstracting and indexing has not taken place on any large scale, partly because many services and professional organizations do not support preprint posting for lack of quality control. Google cannot be used to reliably locate these preprint servers beyond general categories, since the individual articles are not found by the search service.

Disadvantages Extra time may be needed to procure articles if only abstracts are posted, and the author must be contacted for a copy. Unreliable updating of some smaller sites. Quality control for non-peer-reviewed articles, or first-time authors. Publisher opposition. No long-term archives.

Questions Long-time archiving? Paper somewhere? Where will the revenue come from in preprint servers? How is the copyright issue going to be resolved? How can plagiarism be curbed? How can all disciplines be incorporated into this idea?

Questions Continued How can better indexing and abstracting be obtained? Can we really trust the authors to do a decent job? How can different revisions of papers be linked or indicated? Will these preprint servers reach across all disciplines, and if they do, will there need to be a Dialog-like database of databases? Who would administer such a thing?

And Finally… Where do libraries fit into this topic?