On Tue, 18 Dec 2001 Arthur P. Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > if publishing free literature really involved no copy-editing, we would > likely never do it, as a publisher with a historical interest in certain > publication standards.... Just my opinion, really... > The society has stated goals to "advance and diffuse the knowledge > of physics" which is more about publishing quality "content" than > "doing peer review". We [APS] manage the peer review as part of > publishing journals of course, that's how we determine what's worth > putting in our journals. But if the journals ceased to really mean > anything in terms of improved presentation of the content, I > suspect we would just sell the business to whoever wanted it; > Elsevier probably.
It's my opinion that in this case Arthur's opinion does not represent the APS (Marty?)... It think that if the Physics community should ever decide that all it wants/needs is peer review, APS will then faithfully provide that, rather than ceding the titles... In any case, the extent to which copy-editing is worth paying for, over and above peer review, is surely something the market could decide, once the online access to the peer-reviewed draft was free. (APS is generously freeing access even to its proprietary, copy-edited drafts, by allowing its authors to self-archive them, although this rather moots the market decision! http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/APS/copy_trnsfr.pdf ) Stevan Harnad
