PhysMath Central Blog
It feels like an eternity since I last blogged here, but that's what happens when you are about to launch the first journal and setting-up everything in place for the second on PhysMath Central. We've been busy here doing speccing, testing, fixing and some last minute development work in order to bring you the first papers from PMC Physics A. It's the kiss of death to predict a live date for something you are still working on, but let's just say it will be 'soon' in the days and weeks sense rather than 'soon' in the weeks and months sense.
The first group of accepted papers focus on gravity, cosmology and string theory - although there are some excellent experimental and nuclear physics papers to follow shortly after launch. The editorial by Ken Peach is a great introduction to the scope of the journal and open access in general. We also have an in-depth video interview with Ken which we will make available on the site.
Plagiarism & PMC Physics A
There has been a lot of recent publicity on the Turkish plagiarism sandal which has affected arXiv and several high-profile physics journals recently. This has been an 'elephant in the room' of science publishing for some years now. Skillfully manipulated sections of manuscripts from several sources are perhaps amongst the hardest examples of plagiarism to detect, but it is not unknown for complete papers to be submitted with just the authors and affilliations changed (as I had during my time at Elsevier).
We employ random phrase searching on accepted articles and check several full-text indicies (Scirus, Google Scholar and Scopus - plus SPIRES, Citebase, ADS in certain cases) to ensure to our satisfaction that the work is original and has not appeared in full or in part elsewhere. It is however very difficult to keep on top of this and a little unfair to expect referees to know every paper ever pubilshed. I suspect some kind of automated system like in use to check exam coursework in UK schools would be of benefit to all publishers here, especially since the basis for this (indexed, full-text of all STM articles for the last 20 or so years) already exists.
And finally
There is an excellent issue of CTWatch Quarterly out with many excellent contributions from esteemed authors about the future of scholarly communication. There is also a brave comment from Paul Ginsperg speaking out - however mildly - about the still prevalent use of TeX amongst authors in maths and physics:
One of the surprises of the past two decades is how little progress has been made in the underlying document format employed. Equation-intensive physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists now generally create PDF from TeX. It is a methodology based on a pre-1980’s print-on-paper mentality and not optimized for network distribution. The implications of widespread usage of newer document formats such as Microsoft’s Open Office XML or the OASIS OpenDocument format and the attendant ability to extract semantic information and modularize documents are scarcely appreciated by the research communities.
Now that's a discussion for another time!
Posted by Chris Leonard at 15:04 Comments (0)
