{"id":871,"date":"2014-06-02T15:23:18","date_gmt":"2014-06-02T20:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/?p=871"},"modified":"2014-06-02T15:23:18","modified_gmt":"2014-06-02T20:23:18","slug":"aas-journals-going-electronic-only","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2014\/06\/02\/aas-journals-going-electronic-only\/","title":{"rendered":"AAS journals going electronic-only"},"content":{"rendered":"

The American Astronomical Society just announced<\/a> that they’ll stop producing paper copies of their journals. The Society publishes some of the leading journals in astronomy and astrophysics — \u00a0the several different flavors of Astrophysical \u00a0Journal<\/em> (main journal, letters, supplement series) and the Astronomical Journal<\/em> — so they’re not exactly a bit player.<\/p>\n

The days when people actually looked things up in paper copies of journals are long gone, so this change makes a lot of sense to me. One good consequence: if there’s still a stigma associated with online-only journals (i.e., the notion that something online-only can’t be a “real” journal), the conversion of high-profile journals to online-only has to help combat it.<\/p>\n

I’ve heard people say that paper copies are the best way to create a permanent archive of the scholarly record — maybe in 100 years, nobody will be able to read all the electronic copies that are out there. Maybe that’s right, but I doubt it. It’s true that old digital information eventually becomes practically unreadable — I threw out a bunch of floppy disks not too long ago, for instance — but the reason I lost that information is \u00a0because it’s material that I never tried to preserve in a useful form. Whatever future changes in data storage technology come along, I bet that we can update our electronic scholarly journals accordingly.<\/p>\n

The AAS has offered electronic-only subscriptions for a while now, at about 60% the cost<\/a> of a full (paper+electronic) subscription. The price is not bad compared to other journals, and the profits go to benefit the Society, which I think is a good thing to do. Still, it’s hard for me to see<\/a> what value the journal is supplying that justifies the costs. The most important thing a journal does is provide peer review, but the actual peer reviewers do it for free.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The American Astronomical Society just announced that they’ll stop producing paper copies of their journals. The Society publishes some of the leading journals in astronomy and astrophysics — \u00a0the several different flavors of Astrophysical \u00a0Journal (main journal, letters, supplement series) and the Astronomical Journal — so they’re not exactly a bit player. The days when … Continue reading AAS journals going electronic-only<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}