“We don’t need OA in our field, everything is on arXiv”. Nope. June 9, 2016

In discussions of open access, it’s pretty common for us biologists to suffer from arXiv envy: the sense that mathematicians and physicists have the access problem solved, because they all put their work on arXiv.

That’s a widespread idea, which is why we see tweets like this one, which floated past in my stream today:

@RaoOfPhysics @CERN does anybody actually go to journals for papers in physics anymore? Everyone I know just uses arxiv now — Dr. Marvin (@borkarabhijeet) June 9, 2016

Turns out, not so much. A preprint by Larivière et al. (2013) looked at various aspects of the relationship between papers on arXiv and their corresponding versions in journals, as indexed by the Web of Science. they were interested in several other things (like the average delay between arXiv publication and journal publication) but the aspect of their work that struck me was this:

Even in mathematics, the field that is most committed to arXiv, only a feeble 21.5% of published papers are also available on arXiv! In physics, it’s 20%, and “Earth and Space” it’s a smidge under 12%. For everything else, it’s virtually nothing.

Does that come as a shock to anyone else? I’ve not seen figures before, but I always thought the numbers were more like 90-95% in maths, physics and astronomy.

Even within the most arXiv-aware subfields, the numbers are disappointing:

Even the very best subfield manages to get only about 72% of its publications into arXiv. After the second best (69%), no other subfield does better than a frankly abject 31%.

So unless I am badly misunderstanding this study, it seems the old idea that you don’t need open-access journals in maths and physics because everything’s on arXiv is way off base.

How very disappointing.

References

Larivière, Vincent, Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Benoit Macaluso, Staša Milojević, Blaise Cronin, Mike Thelwall. 2013. arXiv e-prints and the journal of record: An analysis of roles and relationships. arXiv 1306.3261.