Publishing
Vol 33(2), May 2007
By
Apr 20, 2008 - 11:31 AM

The January 2007 issue of Physics World (http://physicsweb.org/articles/world) has three papers in its Comment section introducing an issue featuring developments in physics publishing, and a section entitled "The future of physics publishing" (p 18-36).

Editorial. 2007. Brave new Web. Physics World 29(1):13.
Physicists are slow to use the new tools: 84% have no idea what social tagging is; only 14% have contributed to a work-related wiki, etc.

Carroll S. 2007. Blogging for physics. Physics World 29(1):14.
Explains how blogging can place scientific research in a wider context.

Cartlidge E. 2007. Peer review steps out of the shadows Physics World 29(1):29-30.
Some researchers believe that the internet can be used to improve the transparency and quality of the peer review process, but as this paper discovers, "open peer review" has yet to catch on in the physics community.

Chalmers M. 2007. A revolution in bits. Physics World 29(1):18-21.
The internet is transforming the way that physicists report their findings and communicate with one another. This article shows that we are only just beginning to harness the power of the web. Its current use by physics journals, the effect of open access, open peer review, blogs including Wikipedia, and possible future problems are all discussed.

Crease RP. 2007. Critical point: The lost art of the letter Physics World 29(1):15.
The internet is affecting not only how scientists communicate, but also how future science historians will work.

Enderby J. 2007. The open-access debate. Physics World 29(1):23.
Paper warning that open-acess publishing is an unproved business model and not in the best interests of science.

Griffiths MR. 2007 Talking physics in the social web. Physics World 29(1):24-28.
From "blogs" to "wikis", the Web is now more than a mere repository of information. This paper investigates how this new interactivity is affecting the way physicists communicate and access information.

Meho LI. 2007. The rise and rise of citation analysis. Physics World 29(1):32-36.
With the vast majority of scientific papers now available online, the web is allowing physicists and information providers to measure more accurately the impact of these papers and their authors and ending the monopoly of Thomson Scientific (formerly ISI).

Voss R. 2007. The open-access debate. Physics World 29(1):22.
Making the case for open-access journals.

Harnad J, et al. 2007. Debating the future of physics publishing. Physics World 29(3):22.
Letters relating to the debate on the future of publishing.
John Harnad compares two different approaches to open access: gold OA where the journal charges nothing for reader access and green OA where the journal charges for subscriptions; he considers gold OA to be not in the interests of the research community. Richard Reeves calls for reviews of research papers to be made available to the general public. Basil Polychronopulos considers the end of written manuscripts and the dawning of e-mails not necessarily a bad thing. John Chubb comments that the rise of citation analysis as reported by Meho (29(1):32-36) takes no account of the practical value of published work as industrial applications do not leads to citations. In reply, Meho points out that up to 15% of citations are from the grey literature.

Nyström M, Merkel M, Ahrenberg L, Zweigenbaum P, Petersson H, Åhlfeldt H. 2006. Creating a medical English-Swedish dictionary using interactive word alignment. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 6:35.
Translating medical dictionaries by combining electronic word extraction and automated alignment. This method permits to the rapid generation of a medical terminology dictionary. This research, which also identifies inconsistencies in currently used terminology systems, was performed in a Swedish-English dictionary with 31,000 entries.


© Copyright 2008 by European Association of Science Editors