Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?

From: Thomas J. Walker <tjw_at_UFL.EDU>
Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2001 20:15:58 -0500

At 11:17 AM 12/23/01 +0000, Eberhard R. Hilf wrote:
>
>did you check our services?
>PhysNet for the EPS: http://physnet.uni-oldenburg.de/PhysNet
>

No, I diddn't but I have now.


When I found that PhysNet is designed to make it easy to (among other
things) harvest what is on the home pages of members of physics
institutions, I concluded that APS might find no market for the service I
had thought it should offer--namely, of posting authors' APS-formatted
papers on arXve. This no-market scenario would be true if

(1) Physicists that publish papers in APS journals post the PDF files of
those papers on their home pages and do so in a timely fashion.

(2) Papers so posted are as easily found through PhysNet (or very nearly
so) as they would be on arXve.

The test of (1) would be to go to recent issues of APS publications, find
the home pages of a sample of authors, and see if they had posted the PDF
files of their papers.

I'll leave that test to APS market research; however, I went to the faculty
list of University of Florida's Physics Department
(http://www.phys.ufl.edu/faculty/faculty.html) and browsed a sample of
their home pages for PDF files of their papers. A minority of UF physics
faculty listed their publications on their home pages and a minority of
these had links to the full texts of their papers. Nonetheless, I soon
found three that had posted a PDF file of a recent article and two of these
had posted APS-formatted files.


I then tested (2) with this sample of three papers and failed to find any
of the papers by using PhysNet--either by searching for the papers directly
or by using PhysNet to go directly to the authors' home pages.


Thus APS may have a market after all. A substantial portion of physicists
who publish in APS journals may be willing to pay APS a fair price to
facilitate free access to their APS-formatted papers and to relieve them of
having to update their home pages with bibliographic entries and links each
time they publish.


Postscript:
Although I failed to find any of the papers with PhysNet, I quickly found
two with Google (http://www.google.com). Google displayed a URL for the
PDF file of the third paper as well, but it was no longer the correct one.

Below are the three papers, their URLs, and the search string [in brackets]
that I used to find it in Google.

S. G. Bompadre, Arthur F. Hebard, Valeri N. Kotov, Donavan Hall, G. Maris,
J. Baas, and T. T. M. Palstra. 2000. Spin-Peierls transition in NaV2O5 in
high magnetic fields. Physical Review B 61(20) R13321.
http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~afh/nav2o5.pdf
[hebard "spin-peierls transition"]


C. Wexler and Alan T. Dorsey. 2001. Disclination unbinding transition in
quantum Hall liquid crystals. Physical Review B 64(11) 115312.
http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~dorsey/papers/prb64_115312.pdf
[dorsey "disclination unbinding transition"]


S.J. Hagen, C.W. Carswell, and E.M. Sjolander. 2001. Rate of intrachain
contact formation in an unfolded protein: temperature and denaturant
effects. Journal of Molecular Biology 305:1161-1171.
http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~hagen/pubs/jmb_2001.pdf
[hagen "rate of intrachain contact"]
[Google returned the dead link http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~hagen/jmb_2001.pdf
for this paper]


Tom Walker
========================================================================
Thomas J. Walker
Department of Entomology and Nematology
University of Florida E-mail: tjw_at_ufl.edu
PO Box 110620 FAX: 352-392-0190
Gainesville FL 32611-0620 Phone: 352-392-1901 ext. 125
   Homepage: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
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Received on Mon Dec 24 2001 - 02:08:05 GMT

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