On Monday, June 10, 2002, at 08:55 PM, Greg Newby wrote:
On Mon, Jun 10, 2002 at 10:53:05PM -0400, Steve Furlong wrote:
My experience with scientific journals is more than a few years old. Do any of youse have personal experience with publishing both several years ago and recently?
Not much has changed, other than continued price rises and consolidation in the publishing industry. Ejournals are making in-roads, especially in some fields, and are breaking some patterns. Print publishers are working to "extend and embrace" some of the new models.
Meanwhile, academic libraries are undergoing a continued "serials crisis" where the price increases in print journals far exceeds any other cost. There was (maybe still is?) a boycott of some Elsevier products for some of their more eggregious pricing.
Anyone here who has not already done so should immediately type "xxx.lanl.gov" into their browser. (No, the "xxx" is not a typo, nor is it a porn site.) This is where physics papers are getting published. The print journals are surviving, barely, but I think the handwriting is already on the wall. As libraries balk at paying $6000 per year for "Journal of Advanced Aptical Foddering" and as the referee system goes online as well (*), the print journals will financially fail. Maybe no one will notice. As John Baez has pointed out, most of the grad students he deals with never visit the campus library. All papers of interest in cosmology, quantum physics, solid state, etc. are being published on the arXhive sites. In the last few months, I've been using this system extensively, and have downloaded about 2500 pages of PDF files. I know how many pages because I've printed out most of the papers. Five reams of paper later.... For why my printing out the papers does not vitiate my arguments about the death of tree-based publishing, think about it for a moment. (* The referee system could be more richly nuanced with an online rating system. At the simplest, a vote of N referees, as today. But some papers could be marked "speculative, but not bullshit" (or somesuch). In other words, a two-dimensional rating system, or higher. And, as all Cypherpunks know, the longer-term future is "anyone can publish, but expect users to have sophisticated agents filtering the junk." For the next decade or so, I expect the xxx.lanl.gov approach will be sufficiently better than paper publishing that it will dominate. Then will come the more advanced approaches. But tree-based publishing is dying.) For those concerned with the "sanctity and durability of paper," all sorts of obvious solutions exist. CD-ROMS, DVDs, archival-quality tape and discs, distributed publishing a la Eternity (and my own 1995 proposal), digital time-stamping, etc. --Tim May "Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound"