Last week, the University of California system ended negotiations with Elsevier, one of the top academic journal publishers. UC had been trying to get Elsevier to switch to a new type of contract, one in which instead of paying for access to journals they pay for their faculty to publish, then make all the results openly accessible to the public. In the end they couldn’t reach an agreement and thus didn’t renew their contract, cutting Elsevier off from millions of dollars and their faculty from reading certain (mostly recent) Elsevier journal articles. There’s a nice interview here with one of the librarians who was sent to negotiate the deal.

I’m optimistic about what UC was trying to do. Their proposal sounds like it addresses some of the concerns raised here with open-access systems. Currently, journals that offer open access often charge fees directly to the scientists publishing in them, fees that have to be scrounged up from somebody’s grant at the last minute. By setting up a deal for all their faculty together, UC would have avoided that. While the deal fell through, having an organization as big as the whole University of California system advocating open access (and putting the squeeze on Elsevier’s profits) seems like it can only lead to progress.

The whole situation feels a little surreal, though, when I compare it to my own field.

At the risk of jinxing it, my field’s relationship with journals is even weirder than xkcd says.

arXiv.org is a website that hosts what are called “preprints”, which originally meant papers that haven’t been published yet. They’re online, freely accessible to anyone who wants to read them, and will be for as long as arXiv exists to host them. Essentially everything anyone publishes in my field ends up on arXiv.

Journals don’t mind, in part, because many of them are open-access anyway. There’s an organization, SCOAP3, that runs what is in some sense a large-scale version of what UC was trying to set up: instead of paying for subscriptions, university libraries pay SCOAP3 and it covers the journals’ publication costs.

This means that there are two coexisting open-access systems, the journals themselves and arXiv. But in practice, arXiv is the one we actually use.

If I want to show a student a paper, I don’t send them to the library or the journal website, I tell them how to find it on arXiv. If I’m giving a talk, there usually isn’t room for a journal reference, so I’ll give the arXiv number instead. In a paper, we do give references to journals…but they’re most useful when they have arXiv links as well. I think the only times I’ve actually read an article in a journal were for articles so old that arXiv didn’t exist when they were published.

We still submit our papers to journals, though. Peer review still matters, we still want to determine whether our results are cool enough for the fancy journals or only good enough for the ordinary ones. We still put journal citations on our CVs so employers and grant agencies know not only what we’ve done, but which reviewers liked it.

But the actual copy-editing and formatting and publishing, that the journals still employ people to do? Mostly, it never gets read.

In my experience, that editing isn’t too impressive. Often, it’s about changing things to fit the journal’s preferences: its layout, its conventions, its inconvenient proprietary document formats. I haven’t seen them try to fix grammar, or improve phrasing. Maybe my papers have unusually good grammar, maybe they do more for other papers. And maybe they used to do more, when journals had a more central role. But now, they don’t change much.

Sometimes the journal version ends up on arXiv, if the authors put it there. Sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes the result is in between. For my last paper about Calabi-Yau manifolds in Feynman diagrams, we got several helpful comments from the reviewers, but the journal also weighed in to get us to remove our more whimsical language, down to the word “bestiary”. For the final arXiv version, we updated for the reviewer comments, but kept the whimsical words. In practice, that version is the one people in our field will read.

This has some awkward effects. It means that sometimes important corrections don’t end up on arXiv, and people don’t see them. It means that technically, if someone wanted to insist on keeping an incorrect paper online, they could, even if a corrected version was published in a journal. And of course, it means that a large amount of effort is dedicated to publishing journal articles that very few people read.

I don’t know whether other fields could get away with this kind of system. Physics is small. It’s small enough that it’s not so hard to get corrections from authors when one needs to, small enough that social pressure can get wrong results corrected. It’s small enough that arXiv and SCOAP3 can exist, funded by universities and private foundations. A bigger field might not be able to do any of that.

For physicists, we should keep in mind that our system can and should still be improved. For other fields, it’s worth considering whether you can move in this direction, and what it would cost to do so. Academic publishing is in a pretty bizarre place right now, but hopefully we can get it to a better one.