Journals Differ on Whether to Publish Articles That Have Appeared on the Web

By LISA GUERNSEY and VINCENT KIERNAN

Ronald E. LaPorte suffered a rude surprise in April, when The Journal of the American Medical Association turned down a paper he had submitted.

The paper, on the future of the Internet and its implications for biomedical research, wasn't rejected as being of poor quality; it never got that far.

Instead, the journal's editors refused the paper because material from it already had appeared in a series of archived video recordings on a World-Wide Web site operated by Mr. LaPorte, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh.

"You address an interesting topic," wrote Margaret A. Winkler, a senior editor at the journal, in a rejection letter to Mr. LaPorte. "However, your article has already been posted on the Web, which is a form of prior publication, so we will not be able to consider it for publication in JAMA."

Michael Alvarez, a political scientist at the California Institute of Technology, had a different experience when he submitted a paper to the American Journal of Political Science last year.

The paper, which he had written with Jonathan Nagler, of the University of California at Riverside, had appeared on line in draft form a few months earlier. In fact, it had been downloaded by scores of researchers in the field.

Yet it was readily accepted for publication in the journal, a widely read publication of the Midwest Political Science Association.

"We had no trouble whatsoever," says Mr. Alvarez.

As Mr. Laporte's and Mr. Alvarez's experiences illustrate, scholars who seek to publish papers that have appeared on line can encounter widely divergent policies among journal publishers.

The issue is taking on new importance, as scholars increasingly post drafts of articles, which are sometimes called electronic preprints -- e-prints, for short -- on special Web sites that are designed to distribute them quickly and easily to colleagues around the world. Such sites, called preprint servers, are springing up throughout the Internet.

"We now need to think about what we mean by a finished piece of writing in ways we didn't have to before," says Michael Grossberg, editor of the American Historical Review.

Editors of many journals also fear that the Internet will "scoop" them by widely disseminating important papers, reducing scholars' need to read -- and subscribe to -- printed journals.

That fear is intensified by pressure from libraries, which have been cutting journal subscriptions to deal with tight budgets and rising journal prices. Some academics have even gone so far as to propose that tenure committees consider on-line papers that have not been through journals' traditional peer-review process (The Chronicle, June 26).

E-prints don't sit well with some editors for other reasons as well. They warn that the electronic preprints could lead to a proliferation of drafts of papers that could confuse scholars and the public. Some editors say that they also threaten the concept of peer review, because the preprint servers, which often are accessible to any Internet user, enable people to read versions of papers that have not yet been formally evaluated.

But fans say e-prints are little different than scholars' age-old practice of distributing drafts of papers to colleagues long before they appear in print, such as by handing out papers at a conference or mailing them to fellow researchers. And, they say, the public already learns about research in progress through the popular media.

Over all, favorable attitudes toward e-prints seem to be gradually gaining the upper hand, with more and more journal publishers -- both for-profit companies and university presses -- agreeing to publish articles that previously have appeared in e-print form. Even some elite journals, which can afford to be choosy because they are deluged with more articles than they can publish, are agreeing to accept e-prints. For example, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, says: "The Internet will go its own way, and I can hardly see how medical journals can stop it."

But some editors remain adamant.

"Anything that goes up on the Internet we will not consider for publication," says Jerome P. Kassirer, editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. Because e-prints have not been peer-reviewed, Dr. Kassirer argues, they could contain significant errors that could mislead physicians or patients.

The multidisciplinary journal Science also refuses to publish any article that has been publicly available on line, whether on a Web site or from a preprint server, says Floyd E. Bloom, the editor in chief. "We do not want there to be confusion between prior versions of a manuscript and something that appears in Science magazine. We consider that potentially confusing to the scientific community," he says.

Another reason, he acknowledges, is that Science markets itself as a journal that contains the first reports of important developments in science. "We strive for novelty with importance," he says. If an electronic preprint describing new research had circulated widely, that would reduce the newsiness for Science of a paper on the same research, he says.

In the humanities, fewer scholars are posting their preliminary work on line, partly because it is not as time-sensitive as is research in the sciences. Even so, many journal editors say that they would reject such submissions for the same reason cited by their scientific peers.

Critical Inquiry, for example, won't accept any articles that have already had an audience -- electronically or otherwise. The journal, which offers theoretical essays on art and culture and is published by the University of Chicago Press, aims to present readers with material they have never read anywhere else. Says its editor, W.J.T. Mitchell: "We want to be first."

Gary R. VandenBos, executive director of publications and communications at the American Psychological Association, takes an equally dim view of preprint servers. The editors of the association's 46 journals want to publish only papers that readers will find fresh and new, he says. An e-print that has been widely disseminated would not seem new to readers, he says, and therefore would probably be rejected.

But even among the association's journals, there appear to be divergent views on publishing e-prints. For example, Thomas H. Carr, a psychology professor at Michigan State University and editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, says he would be perfectly willing to publish a paper that had been available on an e-print server. "I really don't care," says Mr. Carr.

Mr. Carr sees e-print archives as extensions of the informal contacts that have long existed among researchers. "Those people doing research much like yours know about your research long before it gets in the journal anyway," he says.

But Mr. Carr and other editors believe that, even in an era of preprint servers, they can maintain their readership. How? By highlighting their ability to separate the scholarly wheat from the chaff through the practice of peer review.

"We're adding value," says John Tagler, a spokesman for Elsevier Science, which publishes 1,200 journals and accepts submissions of preprints that have appeared on line. "That's what we're charging for." To quell any competition from e-print servers, the company asks authors not to revise their old, on-line versions once their papers have been peer-reviewed and edited by Elsevier.

Peer review is the key to maintaining a distinction between e-prints and published works, says Ada W. Finifter, editor of the American Political Science Review, one of the field's leading journals. Like the American Journal of Political Science, the Review accepts e-prints for submission. But Ms. Finifter says she would "draw the line" at on-line papers that appear to have been screened or evaluated in any way before they were posted. Those papers, she says, would not be accepted.

The Society for Neuroscience, an organization of more than 25,000 scientists around the world, takes a similar position in a proposed ethics code for its members. In the recently released proposal, the society says that distributing an article that has not been peer-reviewed -- such as an e-print or a conference paper -- should not preclude that article's publication in a printed journal, including The Journal of Neuroscience, which the society publishes.

"Any other definition is contrary to the best interests of science, which includes open communication," says Michael J. Zigmond, a professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and chairperson of the committee that drafted the ethics code. The society's governing council is expected to vote on the code this year.

Some fields have been especially receptive to e-print servers. For example, a physicist who wishes to submit an e-print for publication in one of the American Physical Society's journals does not need to submit a printout of the paper; the author has only to supply the paper's identifying number in an e-print archive, and the journal in question will retrieve a copy to submit to peer reviewers.

Some other societies are following the physicists' lead in integrating e-prints and journal publishing. For example, the Association for Computing Machinery, a scholarly organization in computer science, is finalizing plans for an e-print server of its own, says Mark Mandelbaum, the group's director of publications. The system eventually will speed up the process of peer review, he says, because copies of an electronic preprint could be e-mailed to reviewers.

And although Science's Mr. Bloom says he fears that scientists will be confused by the availability of many versions of a paper, Mr. Mandelbaum says that his group's members actually asked for the e-print capability. They wanted to see how a paper evolved from various preprint versions to its final, published form.

"We do think that the preprint-server concept is very much the wave of the future," says Mr. Mandelbaum.

Even in medicine, the tide might be turning toward the acceptance of e-prints. In April, Nature Medicine, a sister publication of the journal Nature, published an article by the University of Pittsburgh's Mr. LaPorte and six co-authors, even though that article had been available on the Web long before he submitted it for publication. After Nature Medicine accepted the article, which calls for on-line medical journals to make better use of graphics, the journal posted a copy on its own Web site.

Adrian J. Ivinson, editor of Nature Medicine, notes that journals do not hesitate to publish papers that have been presented at conferences. There is little difference, he says, between that and publishing a paper that has been posted on the Internet.

"I really see it as an extension of discussion and passing drafts around," Mr. Ivinson says. "I don't think you can hold this tide back, so you work with it rather than against it."

One leading British medical journal, BMJ, recently signaled to researchers that it might rethink its opposition to e-prints. In an editorial in its March 14 issue, BMJ suggested a compromise. E-prints might be required to contain a warning label: "This research has not yet been accepted by a peer reviewed journal: please do not quote." BMJ might be willing to publish such papers, the editorial said.

Tony Delamothe, the deputy editor of BMJ who wrote the editorial, says he thinks the charge that medical e-prints endanger the public is overblown. Few published articles in medical journals have a long-lasting impact on medicine, he says.

Meanwhile, the multiplicity of journal policies is causing some confusion, particularly among interdisciplinary researchers seeking to collaborate with scholars in other fields.

"I think it's pretty unclear to the scientists how far they can go," says David Johnson, executive director of the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, an association of 17 scientific societies and 150 university departments. "People are finding that scientists in one discipline can do things that scientists in another discipline can't."

At the very least, says Peter Suber, a philosophy professor at Earlham College who puts most of his work on the Web, journals should post their e-print policies on their Web sites.

"If journals would just make their policies more explicit," Mr. Suber says, "that would reassure a lot of writers."

A Sampling of Policies on 'E-Prints'

Journals that accept them

Journals that reject them

6 Leading 'E-Print' Services

Cogprints: An archive of papers in the cognitive sciences, including biology, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. Supported by the Electronic Libraries Programme, in Britain.

http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/

EconWPA: An archive of working papers in economics, maintained by Washington University, in St. Louis.

http://wuecon.wustl.edu/

E-Math: A preprint server for mathematicians, maintained by the American Mathematical Society.

http://www.ams.org/preprints/

LANL E-Print Archive: An e-print archive for papers in physics, mathematics, and non-linear science. Maintained on a Los Alamos National Laboratory server and supported by the National Science Foundation.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/

Political Methodology: A working-paper server developed by the Political Methodology Society, in conjunction with the American Political Science Association's political-methodology section. Maintained on a server at the University of California at Riverside.

http://wizard.ucr.edu/polmeth/

Social Science Research Network: A data base of working papers in accounting, economics, finance, and law. Founded as a for-profit venture by Michael C. Jensen, a business professor at Harvard University.

http://www.ssrn.com/

• On-Line Archive in Political Science Gains a Following
• A Sampling of Policies on 'E-Prints'
• 6 Leading 'E-Print' Services