How Much Does $1.7 Billion Buy You? A Comparison of Published Scientific Journal Articles to Their Pre-print Version

Sharon Farb
Associate University Librarian, Collection Management and Scholarly Communications
University of California, Los Angeles

Todd Grappone
Associate University Librarian Digital Initiatives and Information Technology
University of California, Los Angeles

Peter Broadwell
Academic Project Development
University of California, Los Angeles

Martin Klein
Programmer/Analyst
University of California, Los Angeles

Academic publishers claim that they add value to scholarly communications primarily by coordinating reviews and contributing text during publication. These contributions come at a considerable cost: U.S. academic libraries paid $1.7 billion for serial subscriptions in 2008 alone and this number continues to rise.

Library budgets, in contrast, are flat at best and not increasing at anywhere near the same rate. Several institutions have therefore discontinued or significantly scaled back their subscription agreements with commercial publishers such as Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell. At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), we have investigated the publishers’ value proposition by conducting a comparative study of pre-print papers and their post-print counterparts. We have two working assumptions: 1) if the publishers’ argument is valid, the text of a pre-print paper should vary significantly from its corresponding post-print version, and, 2) by applying standard similarity measures, we should be able to detect and quantify such differences. In this talk we present our preliminary results based on pre-print publications from arXiv.org and their post-print counterparts obtained through subscriptions held by the UCLA Library. After matching papers via their digital object identifiers (DOIs), we applied comparative analytics and evaluated the textual similarities of components such as the title, abstract, and body. The results of our assessment suggest that the vast majority of post-print papers are largely indistinguishable from their pre-print versions. These findings contribute empirical indicators to discussions of the value that academic publishers add to scholarly communication and therefore can influence libraries’ economic decisions regarding access to scholarly publications.

http://bit.ly/arXompare
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2010/2010348/tables/table_10.asp

Presentation (Farb)