On 31/dic/06, at 21:30, John Baez wrote:
What about having an editorial board, which would look at papers on the arxiv, say, have them reviewed and revised, and then put them back on the arxiv in final form, and listed elsewhere as having been through that process and "blessed" so to speak by the editorial board?
This is what many journals do, after someone submits the paper.
For example, with Advances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, you submit a paper merely by sending them its arXiv number; when it's accepted you prepare a version in their preferred format and this gets put on the arXiv.
Another, and quite successful, example is the Journal of High Energy Physics (http://jhep.sissa.it), an on-line journal which I have worked for at its beginnings, many years ago (back in 1997). Papers can be submitted by indicating an arXiv number, or by uploading a (PDF, LaTeX...) file. The editorial procedure is fully automatized, in the sense that it is fully operated on the web site, with minimal human intervention. This allows to reduce maintenance costs, and to speed up the publishing process of one magnitude (the average time from submission to publishing is something less than 2 months, which is mostly due to the referees). Once, accepted papers were freely available online from JHEP site; nowadays, these are available online through IOP's Electronic Journals service; but I guess that papers are still available for free (at least for some time), or at a reasonable price. Ten years ago, JHEP was started by an academic consortium as a spontaneous answer to the (already!) outrageously increasing prices of the main journals in the HEP field, especially Nuclear Physics B (which is run by Elsevier, and costs more than 15200 euros/year... so Vico was right, after all.) Nowadays, JHEP has become one of the major journals in the field: for instance, Ed Witten, Ashoke Sen and Cumrun Vafa regularly publish papers on JHEP. For what it is worth, in 2005 the JHEP Impact Factor was 5.944, that of Nuclear Physics B was 5.522. So on-line journals can compete with "standard" journals also on this point. As far as the "real existence" of online papers, especially for grant applications, career advancements, etc: if I remember correctly, from a formal point of view the only important thing is that to have an ISSN number - which means that the journal is officially recognized as a periodical publication. The existence of a "printed version" to store and forget in dusty (and increasingly deserted) libraries is not needed. -m -- Marino Miculan - http://www.dimi.uniud.it/miculan/ Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Udine via delle Scienze 206, 33100 Udine - Italy -- skype: marinomiculan vox: +39-043255-8486 - fax: +39-043255-8499 - mob: +39-3292606452