Researchers who study physics education have come of age. The nascent field has at times met ignorance and outright hostility within the larger world of physics, but the American Physical Society is launching a journal this month devoted to the topic. Physical Review Special Topics -- Physics Education Research will be an open-access journal, published only online. The Physical Review series contains some of the most respected publications in the discipline, so the new publication will help lend some credibility to physics-education research, says its editor, Robert J. Beichner, a professor of physics at North Carolina State University. "The field is seeing it as a sign that we've grown up and we're now in the big leagues," he says. The new journal represents an experiment for the society, which has never before published an open-access publication that requires authors to pay production costs. The society has one other open-access electronic journal, but its costs are supported by large accelerator laboratories. Authors in the new journal will have to pay $700 per article, plus an additional charge depending on its length. But financially strapped scientists need not worry. The journal has received grants totaling $20,000 a year to pay for papers when authors cannot meet the publication costs. Like most scientific-journal publishers, the physical society is trying to navigate through the new open-access world. Martin Blume, the society's editor in chief, says the new journal is "in keeping with my mantra, which follows the instructions on a bottle of spot remover: 'Try first on an obscure part of the garment, where you can tell if it works and you can tell if it does any damage,' which is a good rule in this business."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/06/2005 08:30:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
