Comparing published scientific journal articles to their pre-print versions

Abstract

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 preprint papers and their final published counterparts. This comparison had two working assumptions: 1) if the publishers' argument is valid, the text of a pre-print paper should vary measurably from its corresponding final published version, and 2) by applying standard similarity measures, we should be able to detect and quantify such differences. Our analysis revealed that the text contents of the scientific papers generally changed very little from their pre-print to final published versions. These findings contribute empirical indicators to discussions of the added value of commercial publishers and therefore should influence libraries' economic decisions regarding access to scholarly publications.

Institutional Repositories and Academic Social Networks: Competition or Complement? A Study of Open Access Policy Compliance vs. ResearchGate Participation

“…2 It is likely from a legal perspective that the copyright licenses granted by faculty authors to institutions under permissions-based OA policies include rights to the article in its "final form" when the publisher's version of record is "substantially similar" to the author's accepted manuscript (Frankel & Nestor, 2010;Smith, 2016). However, these licenses would not extend to the text of the publisher's version of record if the publisher introduced substantial changes to the text, a situation that is rare (Klein, Broadwell, Farb, & Grappone, 2016), but possible. Furthermore, publishers' contributions to the look and feel of the final published PDF (e.g.…”

Peer review and preprint policies are unclear at most major journals

“…The majority of researchers are disincentivised from preprinting if a journal does not 50 accept preprinted submissions (59% of 392 respondents to ASAPbio survey, 2016, https://asapbio.org/survey). In reality, the majority of preprints posted to arXiv and bioRxiv end up being published in a range of journals (Klein et al, 2019;Sever et al, 2019), and the graduate student can easily look up whether a specific journal would accept preprinted submissions using SHERPA/RoMEO 1 . The acceptance and adoption of preprints varies between disciplines: while 55 established in several fields of physics (Elmore, 2018;Ginsparg, 2016), computer science, and mathematics, adoption in the life sciences (e.g.…”

Technical and social issues influencing the adoption of preprints in the life sciences

“…A representative of the American Association of Immunologists wrote that "Since the preprints are complete publications, there is a real danger that they will reduce the usefulness of existing journals in the field of Immunology and may ultimately supersede them" [39]. Indeed, reports that papers change little between their preprint version to the final published version have caused some to declare that preprints can be the end of the story [40]. Despite the irony that the article reporting this similarity added a section on bioRxiv Table 1.…”