Journals are already dead! Long live eprint servers!
For researchers who actually want to be read, there are several good eprints servers including arxiv.org (which I don’t use, but many physicists seem to like it) and cogprints (great for AI-related stuff). Of course, you can simply post your papers on your web site and let Google find them (my favorite solution).
On this topic, Suresh cites Cosmic Variance:
Most people these days post to the arxiv before they even send their paper to a journal, and some have stopped submitting to journals altogether. (I wish they all would, it would cut down on that annoying refereeing we all have to do.) And nobody actually reads the journals they serve exclusively as ways to verify that your work has passed peer review.
I think we are slowly getting at the point paper-based publications are going to be completly unecessary. Right now, people still ask me for page numbers when I say I published a given paper. I was even asked for photocopies of the journal issue. These people will soon die and we will be finally free to let the trees in the forest.
For computer science research I generally prefer to use Citeseer / Researchindex. The entire concept of paid paper journals is just so quaint - I’d generally rather spend more time tracking down alternative sources online than going to a journal.
Vidar
Comment by Vidar Hokstad — 27/8/2005 @ 6:32
Absolutely Vidar. Absolutely. Citeseer is great too, but I prefer scholar.google.com to citeseer. Matter of personal choice.
What is true is that a paid journal subscription is a crazy luxury. At least, in the kind of areas where I work.
Comment by Daniel Lemire — 27/8/2005 @ 16:22
[…] I found this interesting new source of journal papers on Sylvie’s HCI Weblog. For a (short) discussion relating to the dissapearing (scientific) journal, see Daniël Lemire’s blog. […]
Pingback by For Users Only » Blog Archive » Archived (hci) papers available on Cogprints — 12/9/2005 @ 10:21