Eric, having an old friend who is/was editor of two respected scientific journals, I have always had my quibbles with her. That the peer-reviewing process is a thing of the past, and the profit journals make out of that, are just obscene.
If You are an editor, and are paid some sum for it, it is difficult to question the whole edifice. Now the the leading publishers (Elsevier, Springer,...) seemed to overbid their hand. The counterprocess is very slow, with the matemathicians being in the lead, and eg the Max Planck society encouraging its scientists to publish elsewhere. Now we all know here, that something is rotten in the state of 'peer-reviewing'. But there currently is no established alternative. Science is an eminently hierarchical enterprise, with the reviewers and editors being some sort of grey eminence, which actually are not known by name.(The editors are, ofcourse, the reviewers not) It is basically the editor and the advisory board, which determine who is the competent decider (reviewer) wrt what is valuable in the field. In ordinary life on would call that incest. On the other hand, open access maybe a good thing, but adds confusion, and does not fit well with the established method of selecting the 'best', which is eminently hierarchical. Guenter ________________________________ Von: Eric Walker <eric.wal...@gmail.com> An: vortex-l@eskimo.com Gesendet: 9:04 Donnerstag, 26.Juli 2012 Betreff: [Vo]:future of academic publishing 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
