On Tue, 18 Dec 2001 Arthur P. Smith <apsmith_at_APS.ORG> 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
Received on Wed Dec 19 2001 - 19:59:38 GMT