Letters journals have long played an important role in the sciences by allowing rapid communication of current research or preliminary results without the delays of the peer review process. (See Gould & Pearce, Information Needs in the Sciences: An Assessment (1991).) Paper pre-prints worked in conjunction with letters journals by allowing authors to distribute, prior to peer review or publication, copies of their writings to other researchers, who could come to know of their work through letters journals. In the electronic environment, however, this symbiotic relationship between letters journals and e-prints need not continue, as electronic preprints, or e-prints, have the potential to displace letters journals by allowing faster, cheaper, and wider communication of current research or preliminary results than even electronic letters journals can provide. Analysis of the publishing patterns of authors whose writings appear in letters journals or e-print archives is, thus, essential for determining whether scientists still treat letters journals and preprints as co-communicators of scientific research, or whether e-print servers are taking over the communicative functions of letters journals for at least certain types of scientific researchers.

When e-prints originated in the late 1980s, it was expected that they would fill the communicative role of preprints, manuscripts not yet published in journals or proceedings, but with quicker dissemination, lower costs, and wider distribution. Paul Ginsparg’s creation of an automated e-print server at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in 1991 greatly expanded use of e-prints. Many scientific and professional societies now maintain e-print servers, and the LANL server itself experienced over 600,000 user connections to its more than 100,000 e-prints in September 1999 alone.

E-prints impact authors’ relationships with their readers and with publication processes in ways which have been well studied. In From Print to Electronic: The Transformation of Scientific Communication (1996), it is noted that e-prints expand readership beyond the author’s invisible college to include researchers in less-developed countries and that e-prints lessen readers’ dependency upon libraries for storage and distribution of preprints. E-prints have also been celebrated, as by Andrew Odlyzko in his Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals (1994/1995), for enabling authors to be their own publishers and allowing e-prints or separate electronic articles to replace journal volumes as the basic unit for distributing scientific information.

Fundamentally unstudied, however, is the place of e-prints within the broader communication and publication activities of the scientists authoring them and whether authors can, and are, substituting publications of e-prints for publications in letters journals, thereby disrupting the well-known and much studied progression of scientific research findings from technical and working reports to papers in conference proceedings and preprints, then journal articles, then monographs and encyclopedia articles, and finally review articles.

This study is essentially a bibliometric survey, a research technique common in librarianship and one which serves well, by being unobtrusive and having stable, easily obtainable measures, when topics studied focus on the results and ends products of behaviors or processes. (See "Types and Levels of Collaboration in Interdisciplinary Research in the Sciences," Journal of the American Society for Information Science (1997).) The publishing activities of two groups of authors -- those publishing in letters journals and those publishing in e-print archives -- will be compared to see with what frequency authors are utilizing these different means of communicating research. 200 authors who published in 1997-1999 in Chemical Physics Letters will be randomly selected and then searched in e-print archives to see whether they also use this venue to communicate their research. Similarly, 200 authors who posted e-prints to the Chemical Physics Preprint Database (http://www.chem.brown.edu/chem-ph.html) in 1997-1999 will be randomly selected and then searched in Science Citation Index for publications in letters journals. Comparisons of the frequency with which each group of authors relies upon the alternate method of communicating research will be made. It is expected that contributors to letters journals will be more likely also to contribute to e-print servers than vice versa.

The affiliations of author(s) of these "letters" and e-prints will be further researched in sources like American Men and Women of Science and society directories to determine whether researchers’ research specializations, professional ranks, educational backgrounds, or institutional affiliations correlate with preferences for communicating via e-print archives or letters journals. It is expected that researchers outside of academia, and those inside academia but possessed of tenure, may be more willing to reply upon e-prints as communicative tools. (See Doty, Bishop, & McClure, "Scientific Norms and the Use of Electronic Research Networks," Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science 28 (1991).)

Quantitative data will be tracked in an Access database created for this purpose. Student research assistant(s) will perform basic searching and tabulating of data.

Objectives of this project include the following:

1. Determining whether authors publishing in letters journals also communicate their research by postings to e-print servers.

2. Determining whether authors posting to e-print servers continue to communicate their research in letters journals.

3. Determining whether any of a researcher’s professional characteristics -- research specialization, educational background, professional rank, institutional affiliation -- help to account for propensities to communicate research in either e-prints or letters journals.

4. Determining whether e-prints are in any way transforming the traditional progression of scholarly information from technical and working reports to conference proceedings and preprints, then scholarly journal articles, then monographs and encyclopedia articles, and finally review articles.

E-prints represent one type of the emerging technologies and electronic media which offer unprecedented forums for the sharing of information and ideas. More complete understanding of how scientists use e-prints in communicating research is essential for properly helping patrons to access this information and for instructing them in its use. Patrons locating e-prints during their research are now advised that these publications have not been peer reviewed, or even edited, in the fashion of journal articles and that parallel publication of relevant e-prints as journal articles should be sought through indexing and abstracting services. Knowing whether e-prints’ contents can reasonably be sought in letters journals, and knowing what types of researchers are likely to use different types of communication tools, would be helpful in making any necessary modifications to the above advice and to empowering users to access and utilize the broadest range of information and library materials. Accurate models of scientists’ publication patterns are, further, key to envisioning the future library and exploring ways in which library services, programs, and projects can be tailored, redesigned or created to allow for increased remote use and increased user independence. E-prints have the potential to displace letters journals, a traditional component of print-era libraries. Indeed, although the physical sciences pioneered e-print servers, they increasingly appear in the social sciences and even the humanities, and findings from this study would be helpful in suggesting parallels for other disciplines. Given the importance of science and technology in contemporary society, promotion of scientific literacy itself can be seen as a social need and responsibility. Accurate models of scientists’ publication patterns are important to scientific literacy because they have traditionally been used to teach the process of research to library users. (See Learning the Library (1995) and Theories of Bibliographic Education (1982)).

Item Cost

A) Research assistant(s)

100 hours at $8.00/hour $800

B) Miscellaneous supplies

paper, file folders, computer disks $200

Free access to Science Citation Index, the Internet, and MicroSoft Access will be provided by University Library, California State University, Hayward.

• $4,000 grant (awarded) from CSUH for research on the place of e-prints in the publication patterns of physical scientists

• $500 grant (application submitted) from the California Library Association for research on e-prints and letters journals
• $1,000 grant (application in preparation) from the Science & Technology Division of the Special Library Association for research on e-prints and letters journals