Re: Elsevier Still Solidly on the Side of the Angels on Open Access

From: Daniel Mohler <daniel.mohler_at_mail.uni-oldenburg.de>
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:09:48 -0400

First I want to agree with a previous statement:

>> After all, many readers
>> use and cite arXiv as more convenient even
>> when the published papers are available,

This is surely true. In private correspondence my collegues provide me
more often with an arXiv citation than a journal citation.

> (1) Authors certainly do not *cite* Arxiv after the published version
> appears. They cite the published version, not the unpublished preprint.

This is not true. there are a considerable amount of publications on my
desk right now with double citations of published papers. There are
various good reasons for this. A simple cause might also be a double
entry in the bibtex and latex references in spires which are widely used
to avoid typos. With a double citation it is at the readers discretion
which version he/she will obtain.

For daily usage the whole question is purely academic, as newly
"published" papers are mostly obtained from the arxiv anyway - no matter
which version is cited. By the time the journal version is published,
its content has already been read, absorbed and if found suitable
expanded upon and cited.

Sincerely,

Daniel Mohler
Received on Wed Jul 18 2007 - 20:12:28 BST