What about Physical Review? Is the situation there the same as with Nucler Physics?

I don’t think so. You can get a paper published in two months in Phys Rev D. [An astounding improvement over their nearly 11-month turn-around days of the distant past.] They accept MS Word format, are extremely responsive, and do not charge your instititution.

Nuclear Physics B takes much longer. Unlike Phys Rev, they don’t provided authors with status reports regarding internal processing steps. I don’t expect my institution to be charged, but it’s possible that there’s been a policy change of which I’m unaware.

Something has to give here in the near future. The commodity of exchange is warped and twisted in ways that are not in the best interest of anyone other than the publishers. A young professor writes an article, submits it, gets reviewed, gets published, and then must hope that the university or college can afford to have that journal or periodical in its stacks. The professor’s publication efforts eventually are a measure of tenure, thus some economic return on the investment of time and intellectual property freely given away, in hope of the tenured opportunities. Where is the publisher in this exchange, other than as a rentier economic drain from the system??

Well, yes and no (incompatible with preprint archives). Science allows you to post your paper on preprint archives after it has been published in Science. Nature allows you to post your preprint online before it has been published, so long as you don’t talk to the media about it. Both embargos are a pain, but the excuse of not being allowed to post on preprint archives because you publish in Science or Nature seems to arise from old policies at these journals, not the on policies they currently have in place.

At BioMed Central we have found that biologists of all kinds are very keen to publish their results in one of our Open Access journals:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/browse/journals/

It is impossible to say if any authors have decided not to publish with us due to the potential patentability of their findings - but that would apply to toll-access as well as OA journals.

And as for your friends in surface science, keep an eye on PhysMath Central from next year for a series of physics (and math) titles which will be OA and cover the whole fields.

Chris.

Many experimental surface physicists (just as an example) write their papers in MS Word (and refuse to learn even the simplest form of TeX) and simply ignore the existence of online preprint archives. They want to publish their papers in Science and this is incompatible with preprint archives. They worry about impact factors rather than subsciption prices even if prompted on the issue.

How much worse is this situation going to be in areas with potentially patentable results where big money might be in applications such as micro biology? Those people still have first and last authors (the latter being an author for just being the head of the lab rather than being involved in the research).

For us, the transition is much simpler as, let’s face it, the publication in a journal is much less important (except for the CV): It’s the arXiv where we read the paper (and everbody is their own referee for what they read) and not in the journal months later. When was the last time you went to the library to look up a paper (pre arXiv does not count)?