Comments on: Why should I publish in PRX ?

By: Pratap Raychaudhuri

Pratap Raychaudhuri — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 14:35:03 +0000

Now I understand what PRX is all about: Nothing!

NJP could indeed be a competitor of PRL, if they get the format and typesetting correct. Currently, the layout of the papers is simply hideous!

By: Isotopic

Isotopic — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:51:27 +0000

Fair enough.

By: Massimo

Massimo — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:46:36 +0000

Well, as a member of the Editorial board of a respectable specialized journal, I can assure you that the challenge these days is to have enough papers to publish, not to handle the large number of submissions, especially if the journal’s impact factor is less than, say, 3 (in physics anyway).

By: Isotopic

Isotopic — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:57:33 +0000

It seems to me that there is another, more general reason for a new journal to crop up: There are simply more publishable manuscripts being submitted to journals. Perhaps a long-time editor can chime in with some facts (this is simply a bald assertion on my part) but I think it follows naturally from a long-term trend of an increasing number of researchers

There are obviously several ways that this phenomenon (more papers of the same quality) can manifest itself, but a publisher like APS might find the new journal-route (rather than, say increasing the number of papers/pages per journal) adventageous. I’m not a physicist and can’t speak for PRX, specifically, but it would seem to me that a new journal either needs to be hyper-topical (e.g., PRBi) or more broad.

From this perspective, the “need” that a new journal fills is simply as spill-over from other journals, and not to satisfy the burning need(?) of interdisciplinary(?) physicists.

By: Massimo

Massimo — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 11:55:27 +0000

Well, the IF of NJP is not comparable to that of PRL yet, but there is no question that the (stated) intention of the publisher is for it to compete head-to-head with PRL, at some point.
Whether that is going to happen, or it is even realistic, is a different issue — I myself am skeptical, I am thinking that the fact that since its inception NJP has been more or less steadily at the same level of PRB, in terms of IF, most likely tells us that that is where it belongs.
In terms of PRX I do not know, I really do not understand which part of the physics community they had in mind to serve, when they came up with the idea for the journal.
Unfortunately when it comes to “interdisciplinary” work, there is always this fundamental problem (at least for me), that is: if it is interdisciplinary, why should it be published in a physics journal ? If PRX is a journal of interdisciplinary research, why does it have “Physical” in its tittle, and why is it published by the American Physical Society ?
If interdisciplinary work utilizes concepts and ideas of physics, and applies them to another field of research, why can the articles not be published in the flagship journals of that other field ? Is that what interdisciplinary means ? Article written by physicists in other disciplines, which are not good enough to be taken seriously in those discipline but we, physicists, want to publish anyway and pat ourselves on the back for ?

By: Matias

Matias — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 09:23:45 +0000

So I’m not the only one who didn’t get what PRX was for…
One more thing about NJP vs PRL (or PRB): The IF of NJP isn’t really comparable to PRL, in fact it’s about the same as PRB which means that PRL is still the only ‘pure’ physics journal which stands out regarding the IF (apart from Nature Physics maybe…). Even though the open access of NJP is nice (compared to the expensive PRB) the reason why I rarely read NJP (while reagularly doing so for PRB) is that the articles are typeset in such a hideous way that it gives me a headache.