i’m reading through an article about how high energy physicists organize themselves to do their work, with the traditional model of publishing as the surprising second step, the first step being sharing via pre-print environments such as arXiv. though the pre-print environment helps them do their work quickly, they still value the second step of publishing in journals.
SPIRES data shows that … papers submitted to arXiv and not published in a journal have an impact factor approximately 5 times lower than that of papers submitted to arXiv and published in a journal. Peer-review seems to result in increased citation, indicating that the field still values quality control, in addition to other functions provided by journals such as permanent archiving.
“Organizing a research community with SPIRES: Where repositories, scientists and publishers meet”
Travis C. Brooks
Information Services & Use 29 (2009) 91-96.
