Citing and reading behaviours in High

Energy Physics***

Learning from OA bibliometrics?

Anne Gentil-Beccot, CERN. Uppsala. 17 November 2010

HEP and open accessHEP and open accessAdvantages?Advantages?INSPIREINSPIREConclusionsConclusions

HEP and Open HEP and Open AccessAccess

~15’000 High Energy Physics (HEP) scientists smash stuff at the speed of

light to produce new stuff

~15’000 HEP theorists scratch their heads to make sense of all that stuff and then

some more

The HEP “preprint culture”L.Goldschmidt-Clermont, 1965,

http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00000445/02/communication_patterns.pdf

Scientific journals of ‘60s too slow for HEP

Mass-mail preprints to institutes worldwide

Ante litteram (institute-pays) Open Access

Leading libraries “serve” preprints

CERN Library, circa 1960

SPIRES: first electronic cataloguehttp://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/papers/history.html

http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/interlab99/program/kunz/EarlyWeb.frame.pdf

SLAC/Stanford Library,1974With Fermilab (US) and DESY (DE) Libraries

Electronic catalogue of preprints metadata

Manually updated with publication reference

First website in the US?

First website in the US?

arXiv.org the archetypal repository

• P. Ginsparg, LANL, 1991. Now Cornell Library

• From paper mail, to email, to web server• 1/2 Million preprints. Growing beyond HEP

• Author-formatted post-prints often resubmitted

http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/VMS_Site_03/Lectures/Colloquium/presentations/090506Ginsparg.pdf

Was there a Was there a mandate?mandate?

Advantages?Advantages?- Visibility- Visibility- Acceleration- Acceleration- Impact- Impact

Advantages?Advantages?- Visibility- Visibility- Acceleration- Acceleration- Impact- Impact

Where do HEP scientists look for info?

• Survey of 2’000+ scientists (10% of community)• 40% of the scientists rely only on OA literature

• Prevalence of free biblographic/bibliometric tools integrating published and OA literature

• Google as proxy of arXiv, SPIRES, publishers

Gentil-Beccot et al. arxiv:0804.2701

Advantages?Advantages?- Visibility- Visibility- Acceleration- Acceleration- Impact- Impact

Ten years in the life of a HEP article

SPIRES/INSPIRE: citations to/from preprints/articles

Citation peak at publicationScientific discourse proceeds on discipline repository

Advantages?Advantages?- Visibility- Visibility- Acceleration- Acceleration- Impact- Impact

Citation augmentation• Discipline repository yields immense advantage– Five times more citations for articles in arXiv

– 20% of 2-year citations occur before publication

DO HEP scientists DO HEP scientists still read still read journals?journals?

(As many scientists as analyzed here go straight to arXiv)

arXiv 82%

Publisher server 18%

∼30,000 clicks (choice between arXiv and journal)

Do HEP scientists still read journals?Gentil-Beccot et al. arxiv:0906.5418

OA publishing advantage?Journal of High Energy Physics OA Institutional Membership option.

OA

Not OA

OA publishing advantage?Journal of High Energy Physics OA Institutional Membership option.

But journals are still essential

• Crucial role of peer-review • And interface with officialdom

SCOAP3 Sponsoring

Consortium for Open Access Publishing in

Particle Physics

CERN European Organization for Nuclear Researchscoap3.org

INSPIREINSPIRE

INSPIRE

• Whole HEP literature• 860K papers with authors and affiliations

• 80K author names

Conclusions

• Bibliometric studies show:– Advantage of HEP OA subject repositories

• Visibility, Acceleration, Impact

– HEP journals are no longer a communication tool

• INSPIRE: bringing it to the next level– Better content, crowd-source curation – More content, beyond text, OA heritage– More bibliometrics…

• Future of bibliometrics :– One single place where to find information – Consider synoptically traditional and OA sources

Thank you!http://inspirebeta.net

http://scoap3.org

Gentil-Beccot, Anne (CERN) ; Mele, Salvatore (CERN) ; Holtkamp, Annette (DESY) ; O'Connell, Heath B (Fermilab) ; Brooks, Travis C (SLAC) Information Resources in High-Energy Physics: Surveying the Present Landscape and Charting the Future Course

http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.2701

Gentil-Beccot, A (CERN) ; Mele, S (CERN) ; Brooks, T (SLAC)Citing and Reading Behaviors in HEP: How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and learned to Love Repositories

http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.5418Anne.Gentil-Beccot@cern.ch