Subject: Chemistry Pre-prints

From: Eugene Leitl <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 15:15:36 -0700 (PDT)

From: "Rzepa, Henry" <[email-masked]>
Sender: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Chemistry Pre-prints
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 13:24:43 +0100

I note with interest that the latest attempt to introduce a chemistry
pre-print service

( http://www.chemweb.com/preprint?url=/CPS, this chemweb by the way
having no association with this list of the same name)

now has a collection of  6 pre-prints. 

A great deal has been written about the nature of preprints in many
fora, and there would be no point in starting a major thread on this topic
at this forum.  But one or two comments might attract discussion!

a) Have the major learned society and commercial publishers yet
indicated whether they will accept articles that have been preprinted?
The RSC and ACS policies are currently unclear, to say the least.

The policy of Elsevier, indirectly via Chemweb.com, which it owns
and which offers this preprint service,  
might be a particularly interesting one to find out! 

b) One of the preprints above reverses the issue in point a), ie its
an article that has been rejected by two referees of a conventional
journal, and is offered at this preprint service for us to make our
own minds up!  I suppose then its a postprint, or perhaps an altprint! 
An interesting issue, if preprint services start to offer a major component
of previously rejected articles.

c)  I note that the the preprints above are technically quite unadventurous,
ie they offer no "added value" other than electronic paper delivery
and search.  I would have thought that preprints especially should
be augmented with additional  "live" data for people to ascertain
whether the conclusions drawn from it are correct. So, should
preprints offer more than a  "paper equivalent"? What do
people think? 

d) Our chemistry library here recently debated whether to 
abandon paper entirely, and go over to  e-journals. In an indication
of how rapidly things are changing, last year we debated whether to
augment our entirely paper based collection from a major learned society
publisher with  a few e-versions at extra cost. This year, we were accepting
that we would have access to the entire collection electronically, and now
found ourselves debating how many printed versions we should order at
extra cost!   Such complete dependence on e-journals is remarkable, 
but whether in the long term its healthy is another matter. What of
countries where the infrastructures are not up to delivering e-journals?
-- 

Henry Rzepa. +44 (0)20 7594 5774 (Office) +44 (0)20 7594 5804 (Fax)
Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7  2AY, UK. 
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/

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