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Brave new Web

02 Jan 2007

Physicists need to keep abreast of the latest changes in science publishing

Whenever physicists are asked what good they have done for society, they love to point out that it is they who “invented” the World Wide Web. Certainly the Web has had a profound impact on many aspects of modern life, not least scientific publishing. Long gone are the days when typewritten manuscripts would be posted to a publisher before being read months later in a printed journal in the library. Publishing is now almost entirely electronic and papers can be downloaded from a journal’s website in seconds.

But although the Web has made accessing papers much easier and faster – trips to the library are largely a thing of the past – the science-publishing model remains essentially unchanged. Sure, physicists like posting preprints of their papers on websites like arXiv.org, but they still want to have their research published in conventional journals as well. The reason is simple: there is a huge personal kudos to appearing in the likes of Physical Review Letters, Nature or Science. Not surprisingly, scientific publishing remains a lucrative enterprise, perhaps too much so.

The Web is, however, forcing commercial scientific publishers to think hard about how they operate, as this special issue of Physics World reports. So far the publishers’ biggest pressure is from advocates of “open access”, who want all papers to be made freely available online to everyone. Why, scientists argue, should they have to pay journal subscriptions to read papers they wrote in the first place? Publishers respond by pointing out that it costs them money to organize the peer-review process and to maintain and support a viable journal. One solution has been to charge authors a fee in return for making their papers free for anyone to read on the Web. But the author-pays model will be problematic if introduced across the board: physicists could find themselves under unwelcome pressure from their funding bodies to submit papers to cheap, low-quality journals. Of course, the entire physics community could somehow dispense with conventional journals en masse, but until, and unless, that happens, it would be a brave physicist who would want a CV consisting entirely of non-peer-reviewed preprints.

Passionate and important though the open-access debate is (see “The open-access debate”), it still considers scientific publishing in terms of conventional papers. A bigger unknown surrounds the increasing use of the Web as a social network, or what is loosely known as “Web 2.0”, through novel publishing tools like “wikis”, “mash-ups” and “social tagging”. These facilities allow any information – including scientific information – to be shared, commented upon and adapted online, which could lead to new ideas and forms of thinking, particularly in interdisciplinary research.

Unfortunately, physicists are slow to use these tools: a survey of 2695 physicists carried out by Institute of Physics Publishing, which publishes Physics World, reveals that the vast majority (84%) have no idea what social tagging is, while only 14% have ever contributed to a work-related wiki. That lack of awareness is broadly mirrored by Physics World‘s own informal survey (see “Talking physics in the social Web”). No doubt many physicists will look down their noses at the “social Web” as a gimmick that has nothing to do with serious research. There may be an element of truth in this, but as today’s young physicists grow up, working in an open and collaborative fashion on the Web will for them soon be second nature. Others would be wise not to miss out.

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