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04/05/2021

Publishers Care about the Version of Record, Do Researchers?

Some data indicates they may not

Control of the “Version of Record” has come to serve as one of the greatest assets of scholarly publishers. It allows them to maintain their centrality in the scholarly communication system. An important strand of the green open access movement has as its purpose to disrupt the value of the Version of Record (VOR). In turn, publishers are struggling to maintain control on this front. In the end, the set of views about the VOR that matter most are those of researchers. The recently released white paper Exploring Researcher Preference for the Version of Record adds to our understanding by bringing researcher perceptions into this conversation.

The NISO Recommended Practice NISO RP-8-2008: Journal Article Versions defines the VOR as:

A fixed version of a journal article that has been made available by any organization that acts as a publisher by formally and exclusively declaring the article “published.” 

It is not surprising then, a great deal of the work of a scholarly publisher is focused on producing the VOR, which is typically also closely tied to a journal’s business model with closed access articles funded via subscriptions and open access articles funded via APCs or other payments to publish.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.

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