For one thing, listing in Cogprints is more of a recommendation to a
searcher with interdsciplinary interests than publication in this very
obscure journal, which isn't even in PubMed. For another, people who
have used it know that Cogprints leads to full text, unlike the journal's
abstracts-only link.
The first question I have, is what is the justification for this
journal existing in the first place? The second, Jim, is why, as
a senior scientist not seeking promotion or tenure, did you bother
publishing it there? Did you think that the imprimature of this unknown
journal's peer review would add anything to your name in this field as
an indicator of quality? The principle reason I can see would be the
desire to add its regular readership, however small, to those who would
see your paper. It can't be just to get the paper indexed in Medline,
because Medline doesn't yet include the journal.
Could we concentrate better on the need for open access repositories if
we did not waste effort on unnecessary journal publication? Everyone will
I hope understand that this is not primarily intended for Jim personally,
but to authors in general.
Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman_at_liu.edu
(and, formerly: Princeton University Library)
-----Original Message-----
Jim Till wrote:
> On Fri Jan 09 2004, I posted a message about self-archiving
> a postprint of mine in the CogPrints archive, see:
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3384.html
>
> It's a postprint of an invited, peer-reviewed, edited
> commentary, about cancer-related electronic support groups.
>
> On April 21 (2004), a version of the postprint became
> openly-accessible in the CogPrints archive, via:
> http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00003566/
>
> By April 24, it had already been harvested by Google. Today,
> (April 25) when I did a Google search using the keywords
> "Electronic support groups" (including the quotation marks),
> I was surprised to find that the version in the CogPrints
> archive was ranked within the top 10 (at #5) in the entire
> ranked list of links that was obtained.
>
> A link to an online abstract page of the published version
> (in a subscription-based journal, Journal of Cancer
> Integrative Medicine 2004; 2: 21-24) is at:
> http://www.pnpco.com/pn14007.html (this link was ranked #40
> in the list of links obtained via the same Google search).
Received on Mon Apr 26 2004 - 03:09:17 BST