Some recent developments in academic publishing are encouraging. As people know, the UK is considering a bill that will require that journal articles reporting on government-funded research be provided to the public free of charge not long after they have been published. I think there are similar efforts underway in the US, and the National Institutes of Health and institutions such as Harvard University have already taken steps in this general direction. The Economist provides a nice report on the UK bill:
http://www.economist.com/node/21559317?fsrc=scn/tw/te/mt/broughttobook In this context the arXiv preprint server is an interesting phenomenon. Some people are putting papers up on arXiv for general feedback and then submitting to journals afterwards for the imprimatur. It looks like phys.org is willing to go straight to arXiv for its coverage, as in the case of this paper on primordial black holes: http://phys.org/news/2011-05-theory-black-holes-predate-big.html That paper was eventually published in the International Journal of Modern Physics D (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011arXiv1104.3796C). The sequence of events -- whether phys.org went to arXiv or first or noticed that the paper was to appear in the journal -- isn't clear and probably not all that important. I suspect it's just a matter of time before self-publication on preprint servers becomes the de facto way of sharing experimental results and theoretical explorations. Perhaps in the age of blogs and the twenty-four hour news cycle, there are pressures on scientists to get something out quickly in order to establish priority. In my experience the papers on arXiv run the gamut of quality and conventionality. Some papers are very conventional and professionally done, and others are basically notes covering theories that are sure to be highly controversial. If arXiv has a quality control function, it appears to be quite permissive. As more and more people around the world come online, these preprints and the free courses made available by MIT and Stanford and other universities could become an important part of the tertiary education of a large number of people. This seems like another disruptive development whose consequences are hard to foresee. Eric
