Next week is the annual APS conference that was once the March Meeting and is now the combined March/April "Global Physics Summit". As I've done annually, I will try to give some impressions of interesting talks that I see, hopefully at an understandable level. This year I'm only there from Monday through late Thursday morning, so I may miss exciting things - hopefully people will still discuss such things here as has happened in past years.
A few science tidbits in the meantime:
- People sometimes time arXiv submissions to coincide with the APS meeting, and sometimes it's just coincidence. Two preprints (here and here) popped up very recently, both experiments on interferometry and braiding of anyons in bilayer graphene. There are many subtleties in such experiments. The colorized electron microscope images of the devices show how sophisticated fabrication has become in these systems, where very small amounts of disorder can disrupt the fragile many-body quantum states of interest.
- On a much more classical physics note, this preprint uses some sophisticated multiscale modeling to address the question, why is ice so slippery? A super-thin layer of water on the surface of the ice under sliding conditions is crucial, and the roles of frictional heating and heat transfer have been tricky to quantify.
- Meanwhile, across town from me at the University of Houston, Paul Chu and company have published this paper in PNAS, where they have demonstrated ambient pressure superconductivity in a mercury-based cuprate at 151 K, breaking the old ambient pressure record by 18 K (!). The trick here has been pressure annealing. Many superconductors, particularly the cuprates, tend to have higher transition temperatures at elevated pressures. One idea is that pressure distortion of certain bond angles favors superconductivity in this system, and Chu et al. have been exploring the idea of cycling pressure and temperature to "lock in" the altered crystal structure.
- Moving away from condensed matter and turning to science used in the aid of history: When Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, the pyroclastic flow swept through Herculaneum and a nearby Roman villa, housing a library of more than 1800 now-carbonized scrolls. Using 3D x-ray tomography, it is hoped that these scrolls may actually be read without trying to physically unroll them, prompting the Vesuvius Prize. This effort, involving x-ray imaging and AI methods, seems to be bearing fruit. There may be many more scrolls still buried as well. It would be amazing if great lost works of ancient Greek and Roman literature could be recovered.
- Tangentially related to science, the arXiv is looking for a CEO - here is the position description. It's hard to overstate the impact of the arXiv and its relations in terms of open science, and in the chaotic world of scientific publishing, it's more important than ever.
- If you need evidence of how screwed up scientific publishing is, apparently Springer-Nature has been surveying people to see how willing they would be to pay an up-front fee (e.g. $299) just for the privilege of submitting an article.
12 comments:
Does arxiv really need a CEO? I hope they don’t end up like the American Chemical or Physical Societies, paying stupid money to bureaucrats.
Well, they have a couple of dozen employees and an annual operating budget of $6M or so. We could quibble about the title, but having someone nominally in charge is necessary legally and managerially, and it seems like a full-time job for someone technically literate. It's not a small operation anymore. Given how lean they've traditionally operated, I don't worry too much that they would be profligate in spending.
The real point is that arxiv is becoming a separate non-profit. A CEO is a normal position for a non-profit to have (at least in the US). Although their situation is obviously quite different, the Wikimedia Foundation is potentially an example of how this can be viable long-term. I hope that arxiv follows a similar path.
Regarding the fee, that's the consequence of the open access craze.
For a selective journal, if you publish your paper there and you're one of the few percent of submissions to reach that stage, the cost of handling all of them has to be born by the few that get published. So APCs are high. This fee puts some of that on all submissions.
Good or bad, I don't know...
Regarding a fee just for submitting, it’s hard for me not to view this with deep cynicism. Springer-Nature is a for-profit publisher, and there is no guarantee that they would reduce other publication charges if they started such a fee. Reviewers do a huge critical part of their workload for free. Society publishers demonstrate that it is possible to run high quality journals without pay-to-be-seen-by-a-human fees. I don’t have all the answers, but the economics of the for-profit publishers are very opaque, and Springer-Nature made over half a billion euros of *profit* last year on 2B in revenue, up 10% from 2024. Thus, I am not immediately buying that they are under such hardship that a move like that is needed.
BTW, Elsevier publishing had an operating profit over 1.3 billion euros last year, also up, and a 38% profit margin. Any claim that they are desperate for open access fees should be viewed as laughable on its face.
More universities should boycott for-profit publishers, and use society journals and SciPost.
For-profit publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist
Regarding the fee (orig. poster here).
Yes, APCs should be offset with any submission fee levied. Otherwise it doesn't make sense.
I agree with frowning about profit etc. and going to society publishers. But that is a separate issue. Given (!) the profit extracted from academia by for profit publishers,a paying for cost incurred also for rejected papers does make some sense to me.
My point is that Society publishers could use the same reasoning to ask for a submission payment.
I.e. the resistance I sense is not about the issue of paying for editorial handling and cost even if rejection happens, but about the fundamental but side issue of price and profit margins.
(A fee would quite cut down on frequent frivolous high impact submissions just to see where it sticks, which raisins cost for all of us...)
Somewhat off-topic, but I haven't met a single person who is excited for the change from the March Meeting to the Global Physics Summit. Is the primary value financial in a post-COVID environment or does someone in the APS leadership think there was pent-up demand for this?
The March Meeting was already huge, and while there's some value in that, it's also a frantic zoo. I'm not aware of anybody who was clamoring for it to be even bigger. Our group skipped last year and is skipping this year as well just because the students prefer smaller events. With the same format planned for the next two years, I'm not sure if we'll commit to those either or look elsewhere. It's frustrating.
It's really this simple. Just don't submit to Springer-Nature and Elsevier. I take that a step further and don't submit to the gold open-access AIP, APS and ACS journals if I have to pay from a grant. How can you justify using public funds to boost the journal name on your CV right now when money is so scarce and arXiv, SciPost, etc are available?
Post a Comment