Research Paper and Video: “Comparing Published Scientific Journal Articles to Their Pre-print Versions”

The following preprint was recently posted to arXiv and has been accepted for publication at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL)2016.
The authors of the paper discussed some their findings at the Fall 2015 CNI Meeting in Washington D.C. A video of and slides from the presentation are found at the bottom of this post.
Title
Comparing Published Scientific Journal Articles to Their Pre-print Versions
Martin Klein
UCLA
Peter Broadwell
UCLA
Sharon E. Farb
UCLA
Todd Grappone
UCLA
Source
via arXiv
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 pre-print 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.

Direct to Full Text Paper (10 pages; PDF)
Video of Presentation at CNI Fall 2015 Meeting (Washington DC)
Title: A Comparison of Published Scientific Journal Articles to Their Pre-print
Presentation Slides (PPT via CNI)
Preprint (arXiv) vs. Postprint Analysis Tool (arXcompare)

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Funding, Journal Articles, Libraries, News, Scholarly Communications