Jim Till <t...@oci.utoronto.ca> writes: It's still far from clear (at least, to me!) why members of the physics research community seem, in general, to be more comfortable with eprints than are (as yet?) many members of the biomedical research community.
That is an excellent question that has been puzzling many people. There are no definitive answers, but much seems to depend on the culture of each field. It should be noted that not all of the physics research community is "comfortable with eprints." There is tremendous variation even within physics. Ginsparg's preprint server took off initially just in his small community of theoretical high energy physicists. I wrote about this in my paper "The slow evolution of electronic publishing," pp. 4-18 in "Electronic Publishing '97: New Models and Opportunities," A. J. Meadows and F. Rowland, eds., ICCC Press, 1997, also available at <http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/eworld.html> as follows: We can see the confluence of many of the factors mentioned above in recent technological changes. The rapid acceptance of Ginsparg's preprint server was a case of simple substitution. His research community in high energy theoretical physics had, during the 1980s, developed a culture of massive preprint distribution. Each department would send copies of all preprints (typeset in TeX) in this area to several hundred other institutions. Costs per department ran into tens of thousands of dollars per year. Under these circumstances, shifting to electronic distribution was easy. The main loser was the postal service. However, the Post Office has no voice in departmental decisions. One could also claim that secretaries lost, since there was less work for them to do. However, secretaries do not have much power in decisions of this type either, and in any case, who likes stuffing envelopes? While Ginsparg's preprint server has been growing by covering more and more areas, the progress has been less dramatic than its initial takeover of high energy theoretical physics. Other fields do not have the same culture of massive preprint distribution, and so the S-curve is less steep. Still, the usage of his preprint and a few other preprints is growing, and once most preprints in an area start getting posted on a preprint server, that server universally becomes the lifeblood of the community. Andrew Odlyzko ************************************************************************ Andrew Odlyzko a...@research.att.com AT&T Labs - Research voice: 973-360-8410 http://www.research.att.com/~amo fax: 973-360-8178 ************************************************************************