Dr. Heijnsbergen, editor of PRL, came to USC and gave a presentation to help USC physics researchers and students understand in-depth of publishing issues within PRL.
Dr. Heijnsbergen began his seminar by collecting questions from audience. Prof. Johnson and many were very interested to know current acceptance rate of PRL, especially the number for domestic researchers. The other biggest concern from audience was the on-line submission system of PRL, which is not user-friendly according to some users’ experience.
During the presentation, Dr. Heijnsbergen gave different statistical information to USC users, which answered the question 1. It showed that the acceptance rate for domestic researchers has not changed much, while due to faster research growth of other regions, especially researchers from Pacific Rim have been sumbitting a lot. User also questioned how PRL keep itself as pinnacle in the field, if there are more and more articles published. Dr. Heijnsbergen admitted that it was not easy for anyone. To help users know more about peer-review process of PRL, he then explained it to audience step by step, which was my first time to go through with an insider.
Overall it was a very informative presentation. As Dr. Heijnsbergen hoped that it can “culminate in a lively debate about the imminent changes in the landscape of scientific publishing”, I think he did it.
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Some background information:
- USC Libraries has the entire e-access to the APS publications.
- Physics 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.
