Page 37 - Becoming Metric Wise

26 Becoming Metric-Wise

Ginsparg, starting in August 1991 as a repository for preprints (later
called e-prints) in physics and later expanded to include other fields. It
was originally hosted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and called
the LANL preprint archive. Its existence has had a huge influence on
the open access movement (see further Section 3.2). Nowadays, Cornell
University is the main responsible for the arXiv’s maintenance. Many
other, smaller subject-specific repositories exist. E-LIS (http://eprints.
rclis.org/), for instance, is a smaller archive for e-prints, postprints and
reprints in library and information science. Besides early visibility,
e-prints may lead to useful feedback from peers, sometimes even leading
to corrections of errors.
The e-print version of a scientific paper is often submitted to a con-
ference and, if accepted for presentation (oral or as poster), leads to more
feedback, from a larger group of peers. If the research is not substantive
then a version based on conference attendees’ feedback may be published
in the conference proceedings, ending the publication process.
If research is more substantive then an enlarged and revised version of
the conference paper is submitted to a scholarly journal and, if considered
within the scope of the journal, the (journal) peer review process is
started. Of course, an author may skip one or more of the above stages
and submit a manuscript directly for publication in a journal. In a cover
letter the corresponding author must declare that the same paper has not
been submitted for publication at the same time and that all authors have
approved the manuscript and agree with its submission. We note that the
corresponding author is that author who takes primary responsibility for
communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer
review, and publication process. They typically ensure that all the journal’s
administrative requirements are properly completed and submitted.
Usually the submission needs some revision (if it is accepted at all) and
when this is performed according to the comments of the reviewers and
the editor, the article enters the publishing process and will be published
(electronically, in print, or in both versions). The final version may or
may not be made public for free (see further under Open Access,
Section 3.2).
Simplifying the process, one may use the term two-tier communica-
tion model. In this model, the first tier consists of communication on the
Internet for free (e.g., through publicly available repositories) while the
second tier consists of formal publications (Zhao, 2005). The distinction
between these two tiers is nowadays less clear, since “gold” open access
publications are also freely available on the web.