A usage based analysis of CoRR

TL;DR

This paper analyzes author usage patterns of CoRR, comparing its growth to the Los Alamos archives, and discusses challenges and strategies for promoting open access repositories within the scientific community.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of CoRR's usage and growth, highlighting factors affecting its adoption and suggesting ways to enhance its visibility among computer scientists.

Findings

CoRR has not matched the early growth of Los Alamos archives.

Promotion and community engagement are key to increasing CoRR usage.

Open archiving faces challenges related to publication models and peer review.

Abstract

Based on an empirical analysis of author usage of CoRR, and of its predecessor in the Los Alamos eprint archives, it is shown that CoRR has not yet been able to match the early growth of the Los Alamos physics archives. Some of the reasons are implicit in Halpern's paper, and we explore them further here. In particular we refer to the need to promote CoRR more effectively for its intended community - computer scientists in universities, industrial research labs and in government. We take up some points of detail on this new world of open archiving concerning central versus distributed self-archiving, publication, the restructuring of the journal publishers' niche, peer review and copyright.