Scientific Journal Publications

Abstract

The scientific community has begun using new information and communication technologies to increase the efficiency with which publications are disseminated. The trend is most marked in some areas of physics, where research papers are first circulated in the form of electronic unrefereed preprints through a service known as arXiv. In the first half of this paper, I explain how arXiv works, and describe the conceptual backstage and its growing influence. I will look at the motives behind the developing technologies and focus on the views of promoters and makers of the system. In the second half of the paper, I look at the eventual fate of papers initially circulated with arXiv. While it is argued that preprints are sufficient for the everyday scientific practice, nearly every paper in some specialities finds its way into formally peer-reviewed journals and proceedings. I argue that the continuation of traditional publication practices, in spite of their costs and inefficiencies when compared with arXiv, suggests that formally certified publication still has important roles. Certified publication verifies the relevance of scientific work and establishes professional credentials in the outer rings of the community, whose members are not sufficiently embedded in esoteric networks to make appropriate judgements on the basis of reading papers in isolation, or even through consultation.

Images of the arXiv: Reconfiguring large scientific image datasets

“…16 ArXiv stores papers across a range of knowledge domains from the sciences including but not limited to: physics, mathematics, statistics, computer science and subfields of biology and economics. 17 Its development as a repository also maps many key developments for images and imagerelated tasks that use sta tistical approaches, in particular ML. To name only a few: the shift within as trophysics to data management and the classification, segmentation and recog nition of objects across a new scale of image datasets enabled by the launch of the Hubble Telescope in 1990; the release of the MNIST handwriting dataset in 1998; the creation of ImageNet in 2009; Google Brain's 2012 deep neural net work architecture for recognising cat images from unlabeled images taken from frames of YouTube videos; and the 2016 AlphaGo model, trained on millions of 19x19 pixel images of Go board states.…”

Green Open Access in Astronomy and Mathematics: The Complementarity of Routines Among Authors and Readers

“…In astronomy as well as mathematics, a central disciplinary repository was established at an early point, namely, at the beginning (astronomy) and end (mathematics) of the 1990s, thus even before the term open access was coined in a science policy debate. In both disciplines, the repository did not replace journals but acts as a second layer of the communication system (Gunnarsdóttir 2005). The reason for not replacing them can be pinpointed with reference to the four functions of the communication system of science: given that the point in time of self-archiving is recorded (as part of the rule aspect of the infrastructure), repositories register claims for new results and findings and exercise the registration function.…”

“…These include the extent of the adoption of open access publishing (e.g., Gargouri et al 2012;Archambault et al 2014;Crawford 2015;Wohlgemuth et al 2017;Piwowar et al 2018;Martín-Martín et al 2018;Abediyarandi and Mayr 2019;Huang et al 2020;Hobert et al 2020), the attitudes towards open access (e.g., Creaser et al 2010;Kim 2011), possible citation advantages of OA publications over non-OA publications (e.g., Lawrence 2001; Kurtz et al 2005;Harnad and Brody 2004;Archambault et al 2016), as well as the structure of the publication market and journal prices (e.g., Dewatripont et al 2006;Ware and Mabe 2015;Larivière et al 2015). What is missing with few exceptions (Gunnarsdóttir 2005) are studies that aim to draw a more contextualized picture and analyze the evolvement of publication models in the context of disciplinary cultures. In particular, the question under what circumstances an OA publication model succeeds and is being adopted by a scientific community so far remains unanswered.…”

Hidden in the Middle: Culture, Value and Reward in Bioinformatics

“…Classically, science and technology studies scholars have also written about value and reward structures in scientific disciplines (see, for example, Shrum 1984; Watson and Meiksins 1991; Gunnarsdottir 2005). One of the common threads in the work on scientific specialisms is that the assignment of authorship is a significant process in which academics’ work is recognised as valuable or not.…”