5 ms·

A finer point often missed on HN is how different publishing is across fields. In physics i have always been able post preprints to the web/arXiv and leave them

A finer point often missed on HN is how different publishing is across fields. In physics i have always been able post preprints to the web/arXiv and leave them up indefinitely. Their scientific content is identical to the journal formatted version and they show up in search often before the paid version. This is true even for the historically worst offenders (i.e. Elsevier) Last I heard the situation in chemistry was still completely different. The ACS is also known for bullying cash strapped college libraries into exorbitant and unnecessary journal subscriptions.

azalemeth 5y ago
I'm a medical physicist. I have articles on arxiv, and articles in clinical journals like Circulation (which have a huge impact factor, are required to get the techniques "out there" and demonstrate their value, but basically necessitate putting all the detail and maths in the SI, if not in a separate paper). Your statement is very, _very_ true. Physics and maths are ahead of the curve, and in astronomy in particular they hammer papers out at a rate of knots where the arxiv is what matters. Biology, biomedicine, and chemistry are totally different. Everyone uses Word (which I hate) and everyone's formatting looks like shit as a result. The concept that you could have "camera ready copy" is alien. Moreover than that, stuff like a data supplement increasingly needs to be hosted by someone else the further down that train you go. You or I would be happy slapping something up on a static University-run website or linking to it; that gets harder the less technical you get. Moreover, the culture is far less collaborative (in my experience) with a lot more competition. The thing I loved about particle physics was that everyone helps. Mathematicians give talks thanking others honestly for their contributions, and name-dropping people who helped in odd ways. That's very alien to the "We ran this clinical trial" talk I hear a lot of in my world. Heck, there are multiple groups "competing" in my field on diseases like prostate cancer, which sometimes makes the "losing" group unable to publish their results in a "good enough" journal, and it's not easy to coordinate or organise -- the funding bodies encourage competition. Physicists tend to take the attitude that "there is only one universe to study" and collaborate sensibly; sure, Fermilab and CERN are nominally in competition, say (or ATLAS and the CMS, say) but their competition is more about validation and they explicitly pool resources and ideas such that this is the case. I did my masters' in particle physics and am acknowledged in a textbook chapter I wrote with my then-professor -- take it from me, it's friendly. (I ultimately moved to biology because I felt I was too stupid to progress far in particle, and the medical problems were -- to me -- far easier to solve, or at least make progress on. Doing maths and building things in a hospital is much more of a "USP" than doing maths and building things in a particle physics lab, though I do still love it a lot). The net result is that publication practices are cultural more than anything, and frankly in my experience only really the mathematicians and physicists have enough freedom and balls to do their own thing. I wish the other fields would follow suit, but there are a lot of vested interests trying to prevent that.
- beowulfey 5y ago
  I agree; I get the impression that physics and math still do things in The Old Way of science; if we still communicated that way, modern physicists would be writing letters to each other critiquing work and offering advice. Somehow the life sciences became stuck in the “publish or perish” mentality. Just out of curiosity, you mention everyone uses Word in the life sciences—what is used in physics? LaTeX? I also have to use Word, and hate it.
  - gmueckl 5y ago
    Not the OP, but in my experience, when you are doing math, physics or CS and don't use LaTeX, you'll be looked at sideways. There is virtually no alternative when it comes to typesetting advanced maths.
    - PartiallyTyped 5y ago
      I have friends who used MS Word to write their thesis in CS undergrad. Surprisingly it is possible to write math in a LaTeX-like fashion and they show up quite well. I have had more trouble aligning things with Word than with LaTeX so I kinda looked at them sideways.
      - gmueckl 5y ago
        The math support in MS Office is sufficient for some tasks and it's actually very usable then. But I find it woefully underpowered when it comes to typesetting advanced stuff. I come up against its limit quite regularly (I need to make my slides in Powerpoint for $REASONS). Also, annoyingly, it slows down significantly when there are lots of nested blocks (e.g. subscripts, superscripts, which I need often).
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      MathML / very neat handwritten formulae are decent alternatives.
    - madars 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kongolongo 5y ago
What do you think of fields like medicine or biology where preprints can become a source of misinformation. For example a lot of conspiracy around unproven treatments for covid, vaccine efficacy, and vaccine safety directly source preprints that never make it to publication.
cozzyd 5y ago
I had dinner with the arXiv creator once (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ginsparg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ginsparg). What I understood is is that before the arXiv, all "good" universities would each mail each other copies of preprints, and so researchers there would have access to the newest research developments. Eventually, they'd get published, but that takes a while, so anybody not in this circle would be far behind and have a hard time being relevant in his field (theoretical particle physics). So the arXiv was a more modern, scalable, democratic replacement of what was already popular within the culture of the field.
raattgift 5y ago
> In physics i have always been able to post [to] arXiv I'm fairly sure Sci-Hub (and book scanners like CZUR's) made DOI useful, even (and perhaps especially) for working and teaching physicists at large research universities with excellent librarians. Sometimes in the moment one wants to read something sufficiently old or inconveniently rare cited in an arxiv preprint or in one of its easy-to-click references. Or if one is Reviewer Number 3 or that person's victim.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

azalemeth 5y ago

I'm a medical physicist. I have articles on arxiv, and articles in clinical journals like Circulation (which have a huge impact factor, are required to get the techniques "out there" and demonstrate their value, but basically necessitate putting all the detail and maths in the SI, if not in a separate paper). Your statement is very, _very_ true. Physics and maths are ahead of the curve, and in astronomy in particular they hammer papers out at a rate of knots where the arxiv is what matters. Biology, biomedicine, and chemistry are totally different. Everyone uses Word (which I hate) and everyone's formatting looks like shit as a result. The concept that you could have "camera ready copy" is alien. Moreover than that, stuff like a data supplement increasingly needs to be hosted by someone else the further down that train you go. You or I would be happy slapping something up on a static University-run website or linking to it; that gets harder the less technical you get. Moreover, the culture is far less collaborative (in my experience) with a lot more competition. The thing I loved about particle physics was that everyone helps. Mathematicians give talks thanking others honestly for their contributions, and name-dropping people who helped in odd ways. That's very alien to the "We ran this clinical trial" talk I hear a lot of in my world. Heck, there are multiple groups "competing" in my field on diseases like prostate cancer, which sometimes makes the "losing" group unable to publish their results in a "good enough" journal, and it's not easy to coordinate or organise -- the funding bodies encourage competition. Physicists tend to take the attitude that "there is only one universe to study" and collaborate sensibly; sure, Fermilab and CERN are nominally in competition, say (or ATLAS and the CMS, say) but their competition is more about validation and they explicitly pool resources and ideas such that this is the case. I did my masters' in particle physics and am acknowledged in a textbook chapter I wrote with my then-professor -- take it from me, it's friendly. (I ultimately moved to biology because I felt I was too stupid to progress far in particle, and the medical problems were -- to me -- far easier to solve, or at least make progress on. Doing maths and building things in a hospital is much more of a "USP" than doing maths and building things in a particle physics lab, though I do still love it a lot). The net result is that publication practices are cultural more than anything, and frankly in my experience only really the mathematicians and physicists have enough freedom and balls to do their own thing. I wish the other fields would follow suit, but there are a lot of vested interests trying to prevent that.

beowulfey 5y ago
I agree; I get the impression that physics and math still do things in The Old Way of science; if we still communicated that way, modern physicists would be writing letters to each other critiquing work and offering advice. Somehow the life sciences became stuck in the “publish or perish” mentality. Just out of curiosity, you mention everyone uses Word in the life sciences—what is used in physics? LaTeX? I also have to use Word, and hate it.
- gmueckl 5y ago
  Not the OP, but in my experience, when you are doing math, physics or CS and don't use LaTeX, you'll be looked at sideways. There is virtually no alternative when it comes to typesetting advanced maths.
  - PartiallyTyped 5y ago
    I have friends who used MS Word to write their thesis in CS undergrad. Surprisingly it is possible to write math in a LaTeX-like fashion and they show up quite well. I have had more trouble aligning things with Word than with LaTeX so I kinda looked at them sideways.
    - gmueckl 5y ago
      The math support in MS Office is sufficient for some tasks and it's actually very usable then. But I find it woefully underpowered when it comes to typesetting advanced stuff. I come up against its limit quite regularly (I need to make my slides in Powerpoint for $REASONS). Also, annoyingly, it slows down significantly when there are lots of nested blocks (e.g. subscripts, superscripts, which I need often).
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    MathML / very neat handwritten formulae are decent alternatives.
  - madars 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kongolongo 5y ago

What do you think of fields like medicine or biology where preprints can become a source of misinformation. For example a lot of conspiracy around unproven treatments for covid, vaccine efficacy, and vaccine safety directly source preprints that never make it to publication.

cozzyd 5y ago

I had dinner with the arXiv creator once (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ginsparg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ginsparg). What I understood is is that before the arXiv, all "good" universities would each mail each other copies of preprints, and so researchers there would have access to the newest research developments. Eventually, they'd get published, but that takes a while, so anybody not in this circle would be far behind and have a hard time being relevant in his field (theoretical particle physics). So the arXiv was a more modern, scalable, democratic replacement of what was already popular within the culture of the field.

raattgift 5y ago

> In physics i have always been able to post [to] arXiv I'm fairly sure Sci-Hub (and book scanners like CZUR's) made DOI useful, even (and perhaps especially) for working and teaching physicists at large research universities with excellent librarians. Sometimes in the moment one wants to read something sufficiently old or inconveniently rare cited in an arxiv preprint or in one of its easy-to-click references. Or if one is Reviewer Number 3 or that person's victim.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]