Many of us received a letter today from the Editorial office at SISSA about supporting not-for-profit journals like JHEP (Journal of High Energy Physics) and some of its siblings. Why? Simply put, the other journals seem to be less about the science and more about the money. We discussed this a lot in my field back way back when JHEP was starting out, and several physicists switched to JHEP -pointedly turning their backs on Nuclear Physics B for example- as a group. Basically, you do the research, submit it to a journal, and they sell it back to you and your institution at extortionate prices. Better, they get you to contribute to doing their job by doing all the typesetting, reviewing of other mugs’ papers, etc. In fact, most of their work involves just raking in the money, as far as I can tell… So people moved to a model which was more about distributing refereed work for people to read, making heavy use of cost-savings involved in using electronic communication and distribution. Below I reproduce the letter I received from Marc Henneaux and Hector Rubenstein about this matter*. I’ll be interested to hear your opinion.
One thing I am concerned about is the relative weight of physics vs other fields – how much of a difference will this make to science publishing at large? What else can we do to change things? Take some areas of Biology for example. Elsevier (who publish Nuclear physics B, for example) probably makes a huge amount more money out of them than physics, if you take into account the large number of colour figures, etc, (and the associated page rate) that go into a typical publication. Might it be that progress by Elsevier (and other publishers) in reforming their economic model to be a lot more fair might be less speedy until we get the Biologists (and other fields) to support their own versions of the alternatives? Biology journals run for the sake of the subect and not the money? Perhaps this process already has begun? I do not know. Does anyone? Last time I talked about this to a prominent biologist, they seemed to be under the impression that online distribution of published work (particularly online pre-print distribution like hep-th that I know is slightly different but not unrelated) was akin to hanging out in internet chat rooms, and said so explicitly…. but this was before Nature and others started doing their major online work, so perhaps attitudes have changed…. Thoughts?
Anyway, here is the letter:
Dear Colleague,
In the first half of 2006 our Journals have seen many important
changes: a new instrumentation journal, JINST, has been launched, new
scientific directors for JHEP and JCAP have been appointed to replace
Hector Rubinstein, now Scientific Advisor to SISSA Medialab. We wish
to remind you of the basic differences between our not-for-profit
Journals and those published by commercial publishing companies.The policy of the SISSA-IOP J-Journals is the following:
– to maintain the philosophy that publication of research results must
be fully controlled by scientists, so as to ensure the highest
scientific quality;
– to produce information efficiently at a reasonable cost, thereby
minimizing the financial pressure on our libraries and grants.We are convinced that it is unfair that publishing companies make huge
profits exploiting the ingenuousness of scientists in the questions
related with the publication of their own results in Scientific
Journals. Although scientists voluntarily carry out all the
publication-related work (starting with the actual writing of the
paper to the peer-review), they are still requested to pay unwarranted
and outrageous subscription fees by commercial publishing companies
for them to access these very journals as readers.Here are some examples. The yearly subscription cost of our journals,
which covers only necessary expenses unavoidably related with
publication and marketing of all published scientific contributions,
are the following:JHEP: EUR 1,622
JCAP: EUR 1,174
JINST (free in 2006): 745 in 2007
(all institutional prices)The sum of the subscriptions to Nuclear Physics B and Physics Letters
B is more than fifteen times higher than that of JHEP (to which the
combined NPB + PLB can be compared), i.e., 15,211 EUR (Institutional
price) plus 10,301 EUR (Institutional price) = 25,512 EUR. In
Instrumentation, JINST’s main competitor, Nuclear Instruments and
Methods A, charges as an annual subscription fee 12,191 EUR
(Institutional price).Exploiting this strategy, commercial publishing companies have managed
to generate profits of the order of one billion euros a year
(Elsevier), which are ultimately taken from research resources.Besides being run and published entirely by electronic means, the
other key features of our journals are:1. The Editor-in-Charge is given full responsibility for acceptance or
rejection of the paper. His word is final and cannot be questioned by
the Editorial Office (on the other hand, authors can appeal against
editorial decisions). This has proved to be very efficient in
selecting papers of very high quality and consequently Thompson ISI’s
impact factors for JCAP and JHEP are amongst the highest in physics
(JINST started publication this year so it is not rated yet).
Please see the data appended below.2. Large companies misuse the copyright assignment, forbidding authors
to use their own material when they need to do so, e.g., for
publishing collected reprints. They have done it in the past, based on
non-scientific considerations.
We do not.
Indeed unlike those of commercial publishers our policies are never in
conflict with scientific interests because science is our only
concern.We very much rely on your support and we would appreciate it if you
could contribute by conveying to colleagues the information above and
encouraging those who have not yet done so to submit their results to
our journals.We do believe that there should not be any monopoly of
publication. The existence of several journals (hopefully in the
future all not-for-profit enterprises), protects the author against
the possibility that if a mistake is made the paper cannot be
published. Furthermore, we see no reason why large companies involved
in media, newspapers and other matters should have such control of
scientific research to which they contribute nothing.Is it up to all of us, and up to you as an author in particular, to
stop this unacceptable state of affairs.Sincerely yours,
Marc Henneaux – Scientific Director
Hector Rubinstein – Scientific AdvisorIF data
(We are fully aware that Impact Factors are far from being absolute
measures of quality and can be, for instance, influenced by fashion
effects. IFs give only a partial indication. The data below are thus
to be taken with a grain of salt)Journal IF 2003 IF 2004 IF 2005
JHEP 6.854 6.503 5.944
Physical Review D 4.358 5.156 4.852
Nuclear Physiscs B 5.409 5.819 5.522
Physics Letter B 4.298 4.619 5.301
Euro Phy J C 6.162 3.209JCAP 7.914 6.793
A & A 3.781 3.694 4.223
Class and Quant Grav 2.107 2.941 2.938
Astrophysical Journal 6.187 6.237 6.308
inter J Mod Phys D 1.507 1.500 1.225
-cvj
(*Thanks for the heads-up Moshe!)
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.
Speaking from the other side of campus, it is getting difficult for libraries, and the universities themselves to pay the ever increasing costs of maintaining the best stacks of journals and periodicals. JSTOR, the online archive resource for most humanities and social science collections, charges a great deal of money to have access even to the older materials. Community colleges are paying a $1000 a semester to have the service, and while that may or may not seem a large expense for the return of the collections, it is money that cannot be spent on maintaining and supporting the current issues as well as book purchases.
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??
“They want to publish their papers in Science and this is incompatible with preprint archives”
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.
Chris, this is very good news indeed!
Dear Robert,
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.
If it were physics that see the light of self organised publishing, but it seems it’s only hep. In large other areas of physics there seems to be a complete lack of appreciation of a problem. I am currently cought up with editing a yearly resaerch report for our school of enigneering and science and I am seeing things I really did not expect.
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)?
Thanks Clifford. I said that before in one of those suspicious internet forums (chat rooms, or blogs or something): I am puzzled why online journals run by professional scientists is not already the norm everywhere. Maybe it is lack of imagination, but I cannot think about a single benefit we get from commercial publishers. Maybe it is just inertia.
What about Physical Review? Is the situation there the same as with Nucler Physics?