Quantum Diaries

Last Friday night, fellow blogger Seth, some of our friends, and I had a discussion (with what David Foster Wallace called “that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer”) about some interesting results from the CDF collaboration. After a while, the conversation wandered towards discussing the role of open repositories versus refereed journals. This is an issue of interest for science in general. However, high energy physics is an especially visible example of the contrasts between the two, because of our field’s reliance on a culture of preprints. To quote an interesting study (itself available on the open arXiv repository, established in 1991) on HEP publishing practices:

The preprint culture in HEP pioneered the free distribution of scientific results. For decades, theoretical physicists and scientific collaborations, eager to disseminate their findings in a way faster than the distribution of scholarly publications, printed and mailed hundreds, even thousands, of copies of their manuscripts before submitting them to peer-reviewed journals. This preprint culture tended, however, to favour the large laboratories and universities that could afford mailing large numbers of preprints while receiving comprehensive regular mailings. The spread of the Internet and the inception of the arXiv repository ushered a new era for the preprint culture, offering all scientists a level playing field. In its current implementation, arXiv allows researchers to submit their preprints and browse or receive regular feeds on recent submissions in their area of interest.

Open repositories like the arXiv have some major advantages over traditional refereed journals. The first and most obvious advantage is that access to the materials is free (at least to the end user). Instead of a costly journal subscription (which may run to many thousands per year), anyone with a working internet connection can download and read the results for themselves. Another key advantage is speed. Papers on the arXiv are instantly available around the world, which is important in a fast-moving and competitive field. The same results can take months to appear in refereed journals. And as author lists for large HEP collaborations swell, free electronic distribution avoids the high printing costs and page count of reprinting author lists with each paper¹.

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