Who needs fancy journals anyway? That’s the conclusion of a recent study, which looked at the advantages of ArXiv, the open-access preprint server, to the high-energy physics community. The study is published, naturally, on Arxiv, and the implications were reported on the Symmetry Breaking blog.

The authors found that articles submitted to the Arxiv and eventually published in a journal had an impact factor five times that of articles that were either just published on the Arxiv or in a journal alone. Since this could be a selection effect (i.e., a fair bit of wacky science gets thrown up on the ArXiv), the authors looked at the citations a bit more carefully. They found that the main advantage of the ArXiv is its immediacy. Some 20% of an article’s total citations are accumulated before the paper is published in a journal. Even once both references – to the Arxiv preprint, and to the journal publication – exist side by side in the main high-energy physics database, more than 80% of scientists click-through to the ArXiv version of the paper. Journals may add the varnish of peer-review, but for scientific discourse, they are completely unnecessary, the authors conclude.