Steve Furlong wrote: > My experience with scientific journals is more than a few years old. Do > any of youse have personal experience with publishing both several > years ago and recently?
In practice these days many scientists put copies of their stuff on personal or institutional websites, perhaps regardless of journal's objections. If you Google for the authors of recent papers you often find something, quite often something closely resembling their next paper. There is a difference between refusing a paper that has already appeared elsewhere and trying to enforce copyright after paper publication. Most journals try the first, many no longer try the second. It really depends how much clout they have. /Nature/ might be able to enforce their embargo by the mere threat of not publishing your next paper. /The Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society/ might be less fearsome. I doubt if anyone makes a fuss about papers presented at scientific conferences or privately distributed to colleagues (how "private" is "private" is up to the editors I suppose) Abstracts, posters, and so on don't usually count as prior publication - science could hardly function if they did. Some publishers - such as the American Society for Microbiology - say they won't accept papers published on a non-personal website, but don't mind those that have appeared on a private website. Also data can be published as long as it doesn't "constitute the substance of the submission". Biomolecular journals often /require/ that data (especially sequence data) be freely available online. /Nature/ also allows personal republication: "we are happy to extend to all authors the rights laid out in our new licence agreements in respect of the material assigned to us: to re- use the papers in any printed volume of which they are an author; to post a PDF copy on their own (not-for-profit) website; to copy (and for their institutions to copy) their papers for use in coursework teaching; and to re-use figures and tables." (http://npg.nature.com/npg/servlet/Content?data=xml/05_faq.xml&style=xml/05_faq.xsl) /Science/ still demands exclusive copyright as far as I know. (http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/contribinfo/faq/copyright_faq.shtml) but explicitly allows not-for-profit online "reprints" /after/ publication. These days, if your paper is /not/ online, it is less likely to be read. So it is in the interest of the scientist to get it as widely available as possible. Publishers walk a fine line between over-exposure, reducing potential paper sales, and annoying their contributors. On-line access to material has now become a 100% necessity in almost all fields. Most people looking up papers start with abstracting services and citation indexes such as SCI, which is available to research institutions through various deals (ours come through http://tame.mimas.ac.uk), or Medline (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/medline.html), Current Contents, EMBASE & so on, all of which are now online. If a journal isn't abstracted (both the ones mentioned above are) it is unlikely to be read except by a small group. Many journals and publishers make some or all of their full texts available on line to subscribers, and a large minority make them available to non-subscribers. Some put recent papers on their websites and withdraw them later, others are print-only for the first year or two and upload older stuff. There are also a number of commercial web archives to which you can subscribe - but of course a great many research institutions do, so many scientists are used to seeing things online. I can see a lot of things from Science Direct (http://www.sciencedirect.com/) or Elsevier. others like PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed). There are old papers archived in places like JSTOR. In the fields I have looked at most - microbial ecology, evolutionary biology - I reckon I can read rather more than half of the relevant papers online, about half of those freely the rest because we subscribe to various services. In straight microbiology the proportion is probably higher, largely because of the American Microbiology Society which puts a lot of its publications on the website. (Such as http://intl-aem.asm.org/ - they also say they throttle the site allowing no more than 1 download per minute per remote site) A lot of learned societies are in effect either charities or government-funded, and so are less concerned with profit. For example the US National Academy of Sciences now puts new papers up daily, often some time before they appear in print - the latest version has Quint, Smith, et al (2002) "Bone patterning is altered in the regenerating zebrafish caudal fin after ectopic expression of sonic hedgehog and bmp2b or exposure to cyclopamine" which is as good a title as any http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/122571799v1 Loads of review & "current" journals are online as well. The "Annual Reviews" are all online (though not all available to nonsubscribers) which are good places to start.
