Tag Archives: American Physical Society

American Physical Society offers Open Access option to authors

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” APS announces new alternative for Physical Review journal authors to pay article-processing charges – 16 Feb 2011

The American Physical Society has announced that as of February 15, 2011, authors in most Physical Review journals will have a new alternative to pay an article-processing charge whereby their accepted manuscripts will be available barrier-free and open access on publication. These manuscripts will be published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY). The most permissive of the CC licenses, CC-BY grants authors and others the right to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the work, provided that proper credit is given. This new alternative is in addition to traditional subscription-funded publication. Authors may choose one or the other for their accepted papers.

The new article-processing charges, which will cover all costs and provide a sustainable funding model, have been set at $1700 for papers in the Physical Review and $2700 for those in Physical Review Letters. The resulting open access articles will appear alongside and mixed in with subscription-funded articles, converting these journals into ‘hybrid’ open access journals. Revenue from the article-processing charges will decrease the need for subscription income and help to keep the APS subscription price-per-article among the lowest of any physics journals.

Also as of February 15, Physical Review Special Topics – Accelerators and Beams (PRST-AB) and Physical Review Special Topics – Physics Education Research (PRST-PER) will have their full archives and all future papers made available under the CC-BY license, thereby converting both of these journals to ‘gold’ open access journals. PRST-PER’s publication-charge scheme has been realigned with the new programme. PRST-AB will continue to be funded by its sponsors. Finally, APS’s Free to Read program will be phased out, and all of these papers covered by the CC-BY license.

These developments for existing APS journals follow the announcement in January of a new journal, Physical Review X (PRX), an online-only, fully open access, primary research journal covering all of physics and its applications to related fields.”

Source:  Knowledgespeak Newsletter 2/16/11

Physics — new APS journal of highlights & summaries

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"The American Physical Society (APS) has announced that the inaugural issue of its new journal – Physics – is now online. David Voss, formerly a senior editor of Science, serves as editor of the journal. Physics does not publish original research articles, but short pieces to highlight, explain and discuss important articles published in other APS journals.

The journal highlights exceptional papers from the Physical Review journals. To accomplish this, Physics features expert commentaries written by active researchers who are asked to explain the results to physicists in other subfields. These commissioned articles are edited for clarity and readability across fields and are accompanied by explanatory illustrations.

Each week, editors from each of the Physical Review journals choose papers that merit this treatment, aided by referee comments and internal discussion. The journal features three kinds of articles – Viewpoints, which are 1000–1500 word essays that focus on a single Physical Review paper or PRL letter and put this work into broader context; Trends, which are 3000-4000 word review articles that survey a particular area and look for interesting developments in that field; and Synopses, which are 200 word staff-written distillations of interesting and important papers each week. In addition, the journal intends to publish selected Letters to the Editor."

Source:  Knowledgespeak newsletter, July 28, 2008