Re: On-line pre-publishing

["Jerry D. Harris" <jharris@dixie.edu>]

> There's an increasing tendency these days for journals to make
> papers pre-available (excuse the potential neologism) on the web
> before they actually appear in print. It's a tendency that I
> personally am a little suspicious of, mostly because it can increase
> confusion about publication date when that's an issue.

   No, it doesn't -- at least, not for journals that use DOIs: the date it 
was placed on-line _is_ the publication date, regardless of when the paper 
copy comes out.  See:

Harris, J. D. 2004. "Published works" in the Electronic Age: recommended 
amendments to Articles 8 and 9 of the Code. Bulletin of Zoological 
Nomenclature 61:138-148.

...available free at my web site (below).

> But my
> question is this: Is anyone aware of cases where an article has
> actually changed between the available pre-published version and the
> final version? I know the journal _Molecular Phylogenetics and
> Evolution_ has taken to making the text of articles available as text
> documents before the article is even formatted as a pdf. If changes
> are made, it could potentially cause quite a bit of confusion...

   As far as I know, the journals that place pre-print versions of papers 
on-line do not allow any subsequent changes once it is posted (or, at least, 
once it is assigned a DOI number).  Any "updates" to a document would be 
given their own DOI numbers with attendant, different publication dates and 
would be completely separate documents from the original.  I'm not aware of 
any cases in which two versions of the same document exist (in the same 
journal) but where one is simply an update of the other.  Scientists instead 
tend to publish brief "Errata" if they want to correct something in a 
previous paper.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jerry D. Harris
Director of Paleontology
Dixie State College
Science Building
225 South 700 East
St. George, UT  84770   USA
Phone: (435) 652-7758
Fax: (435) 656-4022
E-mail: jharris@dixie.edu
and     dinogami@gmail.com
http://cactus.dixie.edu/jharris/

"Actually, it's a bacteria-run planet, but
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                                     -- Dave Unwin