Quelle von Untersuchungen über die Rolle der readaktionellen Betreuung ("copy-editing") wissenschaftlicher Beiträge sind die in Repositorien einsehbaren Autorversionen, die man mit den endgültigen Versionen vergleichen kann.

Nicht online einsehbar ist S. Thatchers kritischer Vergleich von Versionen in Harvards DASH mit den publizierten Fassungen. In den Kommentaren zu

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2011/06/01/copyediting-and-open-access-repositories/

schreibt Thatcher:

I chose Harvard partly because of the claim that IRs serve the function of enhancing the reputation of a university; if the articles posted were replete with grammatical and other errors, then I would assume that this result would tend to disprove the claim. I also emphasized that the articles might be “good enough” for some purposes, like use in the classroom or keeping up with the literature, but not for scholarly citation, especially if they contained a lot of errors in quotations and references. It troubles me that later scholars would rely on such flawed works, thereby perpetuating such errors. Traditionally, copyeditors have not checked quotations because it was very time-consuming and expensive to do so. That cost, thanks to massive digitization projects like Google’s, has come way down as it is often easy to compare a quotation in a manuscript with the quotation in the original, now found in digitized form online. I would prefer myself that copyeditors spent more time checking quotes than on enforcing a house style, which has less to justify it in a digital environment anyway. I found enough errors in the Harvard scholars’ quotations that I checked to make a good case for more emphasis on this type of editing.

(ML)

Update: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2011/06/04/the-benefits-of-copyediting/