Hi all,
1. In the past, we have had quite some discussion regarding both open-access and open-access journals. However the slant in this blog post is different. I am not concerned here much about open-access journals per say.
Here, I am concerned about the policies that the prominent commercial journals keep regarding posting preprints on the Internet before these articles are submitted to them. I would like to know about policies kept in this regard by the commercial journals in the fields of physics, mechanics, and engineering (including software engineering, computational science and engineering, etc.).
2. The place of "Nature" among journals is pre-eminent. People, even those at highest ranked universities, with pride state acceptance of their work at "Nature." It also happens, I guess, to be the oldest continuously published scientific journal (older than its closest competitors, e.g., Science).
"Nature Physics," these days, does allow putting your pre-prints on arXiv. Since 2010, Nature Physics has a policy that says that:
"...any submission to Nature Physics or its sister journals may be posted, in that original submitted form, on the preprint server (although we do ask that the final, revised and accepted version is not posted until six months after publication in the journal; the published version, in the Nature Physics layout, may not be posted)." [^]
Also that:
"You are welcome to post pre-submission versions or the original submitted version of the manuscript on a personal blog, a collaborative wiki or a preprint server at any time (but not subsequent pre-accept versions that evolve due to the editorial process)." [^].
Reasonable enough! (BTW, no, I am not a socialist. In fact, I consider myself a capitalist, in Ayn Rand's sense of the term.)
3. Now I know that many other journals of a similar standing---most notably, "Science"---do not have a clear general policy that allows for doing so:
"Posting of a paper on the Internet may be considered prior publication that could compromise the originality of the Science submission, although we do allow posting on not-for-profit preprint servers in many cases. Please contact the editors for advice about specific cases." [^]
4. I tried to locate for myself if other journals had any policy statement on this matter. These journals most notably included: "PRL," "Foundations of Physics," "PNAS," etc. I could not succeed doing so. (The information may be there, but it is hard to find. Even on "Science" mag Web site, it's a few links deeper and not at all obvious, whereas at "Nature," it's more or less very easily accessible starting from the home page.)
5. So, here is my request:
Are you aware of policies in this regard maintained by the journals which you help edit or to which you often submit your articles---esp. the journals from the mechanics and engineering fields? What are these policies like? Care to share (about those policies)? BTW, here, also the journals on computational mechanics and those dealing with software in engineering, are to be included.
Does posting a preprint of a paper at iMechanica disqualify submitting it to the journals that iMechanicians often use? How about posting it at arXiv?
What if I discuss the basic germ of an idea itself here at iMechanica, even though it's not written in the format of a paper? How strict or lenient are the views regarding such pre-submission publication that the journals in Mechanics field take? How do you know---in the sense, to what extent could I be reassured?
And, finally, how does the iMechanica Creative Commons License work out for this situation? I guess that at iMechanica it's the CC BY-NC-SA license [^] that we follow/require, and not the CC BY-NC-ND one [^]. What if I wish to publish at iMechanica, but only with the latter (more restrictive) license? (However, please note, it's not just the policy of iMechanica that is important to me; I actually am more concerned with the preceding questions.)
Thanks in advance for any information and clarifications.
--Ajit
[E&OE]
