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> My feeling is that the misery is inhomogeneously distributed when it comes to scientific disciplines. >In physics the situation does not seem too terrible.
by jabl 9y ago
> My feeling is that the misery is inhomogeneously distributed when it comes to scientific disciplines.
>In physics the situation does not seem too terrible.
Yes, but I'd add that also in physics the misery is quite inhomogeneous. High Energy Physics seems to lean heavily towards arxiv and open access, whereas in some other subfields, such as my own in my previous life, some Elsevier journal is #1. Or lets say, on my own case, I guess one could (mostly, at least) publish in non-Elsevier journals with no serious career repercussions, but we're still very far from being able give Elsevier the finger and get by without an Elsevier subscription since one needs to read what others are doing.
I'm somewhat hopeful for the longer term, but progress is painfully slow.
- jogundas 9y agoJust curious: which physics subfield is that? Perhaps my previous comment was overly optimistic, as both Journal of High Energy Physics and the Nature family are published by Springer nowadays.
- jabl 9y agoI worked in, broadly speaking, computational studies of surfaces and reactions on them (adsorption, heterogeneous catalysis, AFM, STEM, etc.). In this area, the #1 journal is (the aptly named) Surface Science, published by Elsevier. Although us computational guys do also publish a lot in PRB/PRL and a smattering of other journals as well of course, but particularly for experimentalists Surface Science is clearly #1. So you still have to read a lot of SS articles.