The reason for wanting to publish with a well-known publisher is then just the same as the reason for wanting your papers to be peer reviewed, i.e. it provides a certification of value that the people who have to evaluate your work may not be able to determine for themselves. Of course, this is a very imperfect system, as is peer review, but it is pretty much all we have at the moment, so I would not want to throw it out completely until we have an adequate replacement.

As for the arXiv, well that is obviously an imperfect system as well, but it is clearly better than the previous method of mailing preprints to a random cohort of researchers, i.e. at least it is open access even if you cannot post anything you like there. In my experience, the acceptance criteria are pretty lax and you can find some very non-mainstream papers on there. In most cases, very non mainstream stuff will just get pushed to the “general physics” category rather than being censored completely. Personally, I do support the idea that there should be some moderation because the arXiv would be useless as a research communication tool if mainstream researchers were uncomfortable with using it. If your work is entirely disconnected from everything on the arXiv then it is not clear to me why you would want to post it there anyway because your audience is not going to be people who read arXiv papers. You are always free to post elsewhere on the internet.

That’s the mediocrity publishing principle: if you don’t have anything really worth writing, get a good publisher so that – if nobody reads it – at least the author can point out that (after it is remaindered) that it was published by a famous publishing house. Very impressive!

Two advantages of internet publication should be that an author should be able to update a publication with the latest research, and by-pass mainstream-biased peer-review. However, that’s easier said than done. I uploaded a paper to CERN document server and now can’t revise it because they prevented revisions in 2004, and of course the purpose of arXiv is not peer-review but support of mainstream ideas as they freely admit:

http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement -

‘We don’t expect you to read the paper in detail, or verify that the work is correct, but you should check that the paper is appropriate for the subject area. You should not endorse the author … if the work is entirely disconnected with current work in the area.’

So the internet media ends up censored (on unscientific grounds, e.g. fashion), just like mainstream print media.

I totally agree about making books available for free. Having freely copyable material available is obviously a more effective method of knowledge dissemination than making people pay for books, so if there were no other issues then I wouldn’t be bothering with traditional publishers at all. My main concern is not money, since most academic books make little or no money for the authors anyway, but prestige. At the moment, having a book published by a reputable academic publisher looks good on your CV and may help with tenure review, promotion and other career advancement. Self-publishing a book on the internet confers no such advantage, so academics are naturally motivated to pursue traditional publication. Therefore, it is interesting to see if the prestige of traditional publishing can be combined with free availability of the material, or if the two will necessarily conflict.

You know that a wise man once said: never publish faster than you can think

Lot’s and lot’s of textbooks are just adjusted copies of the old classics. Way too many scientists want to make a good buck out of there so called….unique textbook. If you want to make money out of books, go for a business study and get the loops in your brain focus on that stuff. All science books should be free available for everybody in electronic version on the internet.

Anyway, my colleague and friend Jeff Schnick has recently published an introductory physics textbook under the Creative Commons License and has come up with his own simple but ingenious marketing system – he’s arranged it so that the book’s website is among the top two or three hits (usually number one) when someone googles “calculus-based physics.”

I find the cost of books, particularly academic and research books, to be outrageous. A nice used copy of JJ Sakurai’s text on modern QM, for example, might cost you $90. The problem stems from a) too many glossy, full-color pages in some texts (though not in Sakurai which is black-and-white), b) few paperback editions, and c) corporate greed (don’t even get me started on journals).

Personally, I like Cambridge University Press and have noticed more people choosing to publish through them. Most of their books are available in paperback and their paperback editions hold up better than some hardbacks from other publishers. My only complaint is the low quality of photos in some reprints (e.g. Moore’s bio of Schrödinger).

No responses so far, but I agree that they might not have definite policies, so they might not want to make a statement at this level of generality. Also, I suspect they might either ignore me or pass me off to their PR people, since I said I might quote their responses on this blog. I can always follow up on this at the March meeting if I get no responses.

As for book projects, it’s a bit early to say anything definite, but it will be a topic of a future blog post.

I’m looking forward to hearing from them, but I suspect that many of them might not have definite policies on some of these issues, working on a case-by-case basis. I was curious about the same things, as I have just published a short book on quantum computing (in Portuguese).
What book projects have you been thinking about?
Cheers,
Ernesto.