Since its creation in 1991, arXiv has become central to the diffusion of research in a number of fields. Combining data from the entirety of arXiv and the Web of Science (WoS), this paper investigates (a) the proportion of papers across all disciplines that are on arXiv and the proportion of arXiv papers that are in the WoS, (b) elapsed time between arXiv submission and journal publication, and (c) the aging characteristics and scientific impact of arXiv e-prints and their published version. It shows that the proportion of WoS papers found on arXiv varies across the specialties of physics and mathematics, and that only a few specialties make extensive use of the repository. Elapsed time between arXiv submission and journal publication has shortened but remains longer in mathematics than in physics. In physics, mathematics, as well as in astronomy and astrophysics, arXiv versions are cited more promptly and decay faster than WoS papers. The arXiv versions of papers - both published and unpublished - have lower citation rates than published papers, although there is almost no difference in the impact of the arXiv versions of both published and unpublished papers.
E-prints and Journal Articles in Astronomy: a Productive Co-existence
是否使用arXiv存储库中的电子预印本（电子预印本）而不是期刊文章？在本文中，我们表明，电子印刷品并没有破坏天体物理学界期刊论文的使用。一旦期刊文章发表，天文学界更喜欢阅读期刊文章，通过NASA天体物理数据系统使用电子印刷品的数量下降到零。这表明，大多数天文学家都可以订阅机构订阅，并且在有选择的情况下，他们会选择阅读期刊文章。在NASA天体物理学数据系统中，他们可以选择，因为电子印刷品和期刊文章被平等对待，因为两者都只需点击一下。换句话说，电子印刷品并没有破坏天体物理学界对期刊的使用，因此目前不会对出版商构成财务威胁。我们提供了arXiv类别“astro-ph”和天文学4种核心期刊（Astrophysical Journal，Astronomical Journal，Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society和Astronomy & Astrophysics）的读者数据。此外，我们还发现，电子印刷品的半衰期（一篇文章的使用率下降到新发表文章的一半）比期刊论文短。ADS由NASA Grant NNG 06 GG 68 G资助。arXiv获得NSF资助#0404553
Science depends on a communication system, and today that is largely provided by digital technologies such as the internet and web. Despite that digital technologies provide the infrastructure for that communication system, peer-reviewed journals continue to mimic workflows and processes from the print era. This paper focuses on one artifact from the print era, the journal issue, and describes how this artifact has been detrimental to the communication of science and therefore to science itself. To replace the journal issue, this paper argues that scholarly publishing and journals could more f…
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' argum…
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 from two distinct science, technology, and medicine (STM) corpora and their final published counterparts. This c…
arXiv is a popular pre-print server focusing on natural science disciplines (e.g. physics, computer science, quantitative biology). As a platform with focus on easy publishing services it does not provide enhanced search functionality -- but offers programming interfaces which allow external parties to add these services. This paper presents extensions of the open source framework arXiv Sanity Preserver (SP). With respect to the original framework, it derestricts the topical focus and allows for text-based search and visualisation of all papers in arXiv. To this end, all papers are stored in a…
This article analyses the difference in timing between the online availability of articles and their corresponding print publication and how it affects two bibliometric indicators: Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and Immediacy Index. This research examined 18,526 articles, the complete collection of articles and reviews published by a set of 61 journals on Urology and Nephrology in 2013 and 2014. The findings suggest that Advance Online Publication (AOP) accelerates the citation of articles and affects the JIF and Immediacy Index values. Regarding the JIF values, the comparison between journals wi…
It may seem surprising that, out of all areas of science, computer scientists have been slow to post electronic versions of papers on sites like arXiv.org. Instead, computer scientists have tended to place papers on our individual home pages, but this loses the benefits of aggregation, namely notification and browsing. But this is changing. More and more computer scientists are now using the arXiv. At the same time, there is ongoing discussion and controversy about how prepublication affects peer review, especially for double-blind conferences. This discussion is often carried out with preciou…
This paper quantifies to which extent preprints in arXiv accelerate scholarly communication. The following subject fields were investigated up to the year 2012: High Energy Physics (HEP), Mathematics, Astrophysics, Quantitative Biology, and Library and Information Science (LIS). Publication and citation data was downloaded from Scopus and matched with corresponding preprints in arXiv. Furthermore, the INSPIRE HEP database was used to retrieve citation data for papers related to HEP. The bibliometric analysis deals with the growth in numbers of articles published having a previous preprint in a…
The structure of collaboration is known to be of great importance for the success of scientific endeavors. In particular, various types of social capital employed in co-authored work and projects bridging disciplinary boundaries have attracted researchers' interest. Almost all previous studies, however, use samples with an inherent survivor bias, i.e., they focus on papers that have already been published. In contrast, our article examines the chances for getting a working paper published by using a unique dataset of 245,000 papers uploaded to arXiv. ArXiv is a popular preprint platform in Phy…
We comment on a recent article by Laakso et al. (arXiv:2008.11933 [cs.DL]), in which the disappearance of 176 open access journals from the Internet is noted. We argue that one reason these journals may have vanished is that they were predatory journals. The de-listing of predators from the Directory of Open Access Journals in 2014 and the abundance of predatory journals and awareness thereof in North America parsimoniously explain the temporal and geographic patterns Laakso et al. observed.
New thinking needs to emerge about how to reform publishing along lines that best meet two perennial needs of scientific communication. This paper discusses a model that addresses these two needs with respect to physics. Given the considerable barriers that its realization in pristine form faces, the model aspires merely to be a heuristic or guidepost. It provides an analytical framework for criticizing aspects of the current publishing ecosystem, helps diagnose problems in current efforts to reform it, including those emanating from the open access movement, and raises consciousness about cer…
Evidence confirming that OA increases impact will not be sufficient to induce enough researchers to provide OA; only mandates from their institutions and funders can ensure that. HEP researchers continue to submit their papers to peer-reviewed journals, as they always did, depositing both their unrefereed preprints and their refereed postprints. None of that has changed. In fields like HEP and astrophysics, the journal affordability/accessibility problem is not as great as in many other fields, where it the HEP Early Access impact advantage translates into the OA impact advantage itself. Almos…
Scientific journals are currently the primary medium used by researchers to report their research findings. The transformation of print journals into e-journals has simplified the process of submissions to journals and also their access has become wider. Journals are usually published by commercial publishers, learned societies as well as Universities. There are different number of journals published from different countries. This paper attempts to explore whether the number of journals published from a country influences its research output. Scopus master journal list is analysed to identify …
arXiv is an e-print repository of papers in physics, computer science, and biology, amongst others. viXra is a newer repository of e-prints on similar topics. Scienceography is the study of the writing of science. In this work we perform a scienceographic comparison of a selection of papers from the physics section of each archive. We provide the first study of the viXra archive and describe key differences on how science is written by these communities.
The preservation of the scholarly record has been a point of concern since the beginning of knowledge production. With print publications, the responsibility rested primarily with librarians, but the shift toward digital publishing and, in particular, the introduction of open access (OA) have caused ambiguity and complexity. Consequently, the long-term accessibility of journals is not always guaranteed, and they can even disappear from the web completely. The focus of this exploratory study is on the phenomenon of vanished journals, something that has not been carried out before. For the analy…
When analyzing the content of Physics Letter B (PLB) web pages, one goal was to separate articles from particle physics(HEP) and nuclear physics(NP). PLB contains information about the subject area of an article: Astrophysics and Cosmology, Experiments, Phenomenology or Theory. Those subject areas have been used since 2004. To extend those areas to earlier dates and try to separate HEP and NP publications, the idea was to use the information on the arXiv to accomplish this, by correlating a publication in PLB with a publication in one of the different arXiv repositories for particle, nuclear o…
The effect of 'Open Access' upon citation impact: An analysis of ArXiv's Condensed Matter Section
本文统计分析了存放在预印本服务器ArXiv（由康奈尔大学主办）的凝聚态物质部分的文章的引用影响，并随后发表在科学期刊上，与未存放在该档案中的同一期刊中的文章相比。其主要目的是进一步说明和粗略估计两个因素的影响，“早期观点”和“质量偏差”，在这两组论文之间的引用影响的差异，使用引用数据汤姆森科学的Web of Science。它提出了一些凝聚态物理学领域的期刊的估计。为了区分“开放获取”效应和早期视图效应，纵向引文数据进行了分析，涵盖了长达7年的时间段。质量偏差是通过计算ArXiv引用影响差异在期刊上发表的个人作者的水平，考虑到合著。该分析提供了强烈的质量偏差和早期视图效应的证据。校正这些影响，有一个样本的6个凝聚态物理学期刊的详细研究，没有迹象表明一般的“开放获取优势”的论文存放在ArXiv。这项研究确实提供了ArXiv加速引用的证据，因为ArXiv使论文更早可用，而不是使论文免费可用。
A public preprint server such as arXiv allows authors to publish their manuscripts before submitting them to journals for peer review. It offers the chance to establish priority by making the results available upon completion. This article presents the arXiv section Quantitative Biology and investigates the advantages of preprint publications in terms of reception, which can be measured by means of citations. This paper focuses on the publication and citation delay, citation counts and the authors publishing their e-prints on arXiv. Moreover, the paper discusses the benefit for scientists as w…
To examine the reproducibility of COVID-19 research, we create a dataset of pre-prints posted to arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv between 28 January 2020 and 30 June 2021 that are related to COVID-19. We extract the text from these pre-prints and parse them looking for keyword markers signaling the availability of the data and code underpinning the pre-print. For the pre-prints that are in our sample, we are unable to find markers of either open data or open code for 75 per cent of those on arXiv, 67 per cent of those on bioRxiv, and 79 per cent of those on medRxiv.
Physics is one of the most successful endeavors in science. Being a prototypic big science it also reflects the growing tendency for scientific collaborations. Utilizing 250,000 papers from ArXiv.org a prepublishing platform prevalent in Physics we construct large coauthorship networks to investigate how individual network positions influence scientific success. In this context, success is seen as getting a paper published in high impact journals of physical subdisciplines as compared to not getting it published at all or in rather peripheral journals only. To control the nested levels of auth…
Traditionally, mathematical knowledge is published in printed media such as books or journals. With the advent of the Internet, a new method of publication became available. To date, however, most online mathematical publications do not employ the full capabilities of the medium. We describe a project to modernize online mathematics presentation and build a community-focused environment in which the lines between "author" and "reader" are blurred, enhancing collaboration and improving publication quality.
In this study we analyse the key driving factors of preprints in enhancing scholarly communication. To this end we use four groups of metrics, one referring to scholarly communication and based on bibliometric indicators (Web of Science and Scopus citations), while the others reflect usage (usage counts in Web of Science), capture (Mendeley readers) and social media attention (Tweets). Hereby we measure two effects associated with preprint publishing: publication delay and impact. We define and use several indicators to assess the impact of journal articles with previous preprint versions in a…
