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

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.