Sci Journals, authors, internet

[Ken Brown]

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?


In practice these days many scientists put copies of their stuff on
personal or institutional websites, perhaps regardless of journal's
objections.  If you Google for the authors of recent papers you often
find something, quite often something closely resembling their next
paper. 

There is a difference between refusing a paper that has already
appeared  elsewhere and trying to enforce copyright after paper
publication. Most journals try the first, many no longer try the second.
It really depends how much clout they have.  /Nature/ might be able to
enforce their embargo by the mere threat of not publishing your next
paper.  /The Proceedings of the  Yorkshire Geological Society/ might be
less fearsome.  I doubt if anyone makes a fuss about papers presented at
scientific conferences or privately distributed to colleagues (how
"private" is "private" is up to the editors I suppose) Abstracts,
posters, and  so on don't usually count as prior publication - science
could hardly function if they did.

Some publishers - such as the American Society for Microbiology - say
they won't accept papers published on a non-personal website, but don't
mind those that have appeared on a private website.  Also data can be
published as long as it doesn't "constitute the substance of the
submission". Biomolecular journals often /require/ that data (especially
sequence data) be freely available online. 

/Nature/ also allows personal republication: "we are happy to extend to
all authors the rights laid out in our new licence agreements in respect
of the material assigned to us: to re- use the papers in any printed
volume of which they are an author; to post a PDF copy on their own
(not-for-profit) website; to copy (and for their institutions to copy)
their papers for use in coursework teaching; and to re-use figures and
tables."
(http://npg.nature.com/npg/servlet/Content?data=xml/05_faq.xml&style=xml/05_faq.xsl)

/Science/ still demands exclusive copyright as far as I know.
(http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/contribinfo/faq/copyright_faq.shtml)
but explicitly allows not-for-profit online "reprints" /after/
publication.

These days, if your paper is /not/ online, it is less likely to be read.
So it is in the interest of the scientist to get it as widely available
as possible. Publishers walk a fine line between over-exposure, reducing
potential paper sales, and annoying their contributors.

On-line access to material has now become a 100% necessity in almost all
fields. Most people looking up papers start with abstracting services
and citation indexes such as SCI, which is available to research
institutions through various deals (ours come through
http://tame.mimas.ac.uk), or Medline
(http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/medline.html), Current Contents,
EMBASE & so on, all of which are now online. If a journal isn't
abstracted (both the ones mentioned above are) it is unlikely to be read
except by a small group.

Many journals and publishers make some or all of their full texts
available on line to subscribers, and a large minority make them
available to non-subscribers. Some put recent papers on their websites
and withdraw them later, others are print-only for the first year or two
and upload older stuff.  There are also a number of commercial web
archives to which you can subscribe - but of course a great many
research institutions do, so many scientists are used to seeing things
online. I can see a lot of things from Science Direct
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/) or Elsevier.  others like PubMed
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed). There are old
papers archived in places like JSTOR.

In the fields I have looked at most - microbial ecology, evolutionary
biology - I reckon I can read rather more than half of the relevant
papers  online, about half of those freely the rest because we subscribe
to various services.  In straight microbiology the proportion is
probably higher, largely because of the American Microbiology Society
which puts a lot of its publications on the website. (Such as
http://intl-aem.asm.org/ - they also say they throttle the site allowing
no more than 1 download per minute per remote site) A lot of learned
societies are in effect either charities or government-funded, and so
are less concerned with profit. For example the US National Academy of
Sciences now puts new papers up daily, often some time before they
appear in print - the latest version has Quint, Smith, et al (2002)
"Bone patterning is altered in the regenerating zebrafish caudal fin
after ectopic expression of sonic hedgehog and bmp2b or exposure to
cyclopamine" which is as good a title as any
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/122571799v1

Loads of review & "current" journals are online as well. The "Annual
Reviews" are all online (though not all available to nonsubscribers)
which are good places to start.