Sci Journals, authors, internet

[Tim May]

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"