The journal as an overlay on preprint databases

Abstract

The Physical Review journals, particularly Physical Review D (PRD) on particle and gravitational physics, have been near the centre of a revolution in electronic publishing caused by the Los Alamos eprint archive, which began posting papers in theoretical particle physics nearly eight years ago. This paper describes how the journals, particularly PRD, have responded and thrived with this revolution in scientific communication, and how we expect things to continue to develop in the future.

e-Publishing's Impacts on Journals and Journal Articles

“…The physics discipline was a pioneer in the application of e-Publishing. Los Alamos 'e-prints', also known as arXiv, started in August 1991, and Physical Review D (published by and for the high-energy physics scholarly community) started in 1996 (Smith, 2000). The World Wide Web itself originated at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva in 1991 (Berners- Lee, 2000).…”

“…With that, the publication delays that used to arise from queuing are no longer necessary. For example, publishing an article as soon as it is ready for release has been the practice for Physical Review D since 1997 (Smith, 2000), and for the Journal and the Communications of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS, CAIS) since their inception in 1999.…”

“…It is highly desirable for both journal-reputation/brand-management and transparency that the journal continue to provide an index-page identifying the papers that the editorial team has approved, and linking to them. This is discussed in Ginsparg (1994) re arXiv.org, Odlyzko (1995), Smith (1999), Smith (2000) and Kingsley (2007a), but the idea goes back to at least 1926 (Phelps & Herlin, 1960).…”

Research Communication Costs in Australia: Emerging Opportunities and Benefits

“…For all of these roles, however, there are now alternatives emerging based upon emerging ICT applicationssuch as discussion groups, web logs, etc. Friedlander and Bessette (2003, p9) observed that the nature and role of scholarly journals are changing, and Smith (2000) suggested that with the development of the web, journals no longer form the primary communication medium. Indeed, for most of the roles traditionally played by the journal alternatives are emerging and are being used, albeit, to date, in rather experimental ways.…”

Transforming Scientific Communication for the 21st Century

“…69 The American Physical Society has successfully begun to work with xxx to speed up peer review. 70 In addition the initial concern some authors displayed regarding the lack of prestige associated with scholarly electronic journals is eroding. 71 Serious obstacles remain, however, and one of the largest is convincing publishing stakeholders to change their financial models.…”