On 9 July 1997 Alexei Kitaev published a revolutionary proposal for fault-tolerant quantum computation. In his scheme, the multiplicity of states that qubits depend on resides not in individual particles but in their shared topology. Just as a rubber ring remains a ring if poked, pulled, or pushed, Kitaev’s particle collective retains its all-important coherence if locally perturbed.
By “published,” I mean he posted the paper to the arXiv preprint server. The paper did eventually appear in a journal—Annals of Physics seven years later. According to Google Scholar, the paper has been cited 2667 times.
This figure appeared in 2005 news story I wrote about topological quantum computing. The original caption read: “Braiding the world lines of nonabelian quasiparticles around each other results in a sequence of unitary transformations that approximate a logic gate. Here, a conditional NOT (CNOT) gate is realized using two triplets of quasiparticles. One triplet (green) remains in place while two quasiparticles from the other triplet (blue) wind through it.”
Kitaev’s proposal, which helped to beget the thriving field of topological quantum computing, came to mind on Monday when I read a news story in Nature. Entitled “Leading mathematician launches arXiv ‘overlay’ journal,” Philip Ball’s story opened as follows:
New journals spring up with overwhelming, almost tiresome, frequency these days. But Discrete Analysis is different. This journal is online only—but it will contain no papers. Rather, it will provide links to mathematics papers hosted on the preprint server arXiv. Researchers will submit their papers directly from arXiv to the journal, which will evaluate them by conventional peer review.
The new journal is the brain child of mathematician Tim Gowers, who was awarded the 1998 Fields Medal for identifying connections between functional analysis and combinatorics. Gowers is also a prominent critic of companies that publish scientific journals for profit. Discrete Analysis will charge neither readers nor contributors.
Besides arXiv, Discrete Analysis depends on Scholastica, a four-year-old journal management platform that was developed originally for law reviews. Using Scholastica will initially cost Discrete Analysis $10 a paper. Thanks to a grant from Cambridge University, where Gower works, managing the review of the first 500 papers will be fully subsidized.
Gowers’s model might seem like an attractive one for physicists to follow, especially those in fields that have a strong enough sense of community that they would support—that is, read, publish in, and referee for—a new open-access journal.
Gauging that attractiveness is tricky because it entails estimating how much physicists value the services and features that traditional journals provide. The list is extensive. To enable efficient literature searches, publishers tag not just a paper’s authors, title, and other bibliographical data, but also keywords related to the paper’s content. To ensure that papers are available electronically in perpetuity, publishers deposit papers with the digital preservation service Portico. To support the reliable citation, linking, and indexing of papers, publishers deposit papers with the registration agency CrossRef. To enhance readability, publishers offer papers not just in PDF format but also in XML.
Do physicists value those services, all of which incur costs? When I ran Physics Today‘s Search and Discovery department, I routinely asked the physicists I interviewed where they published their work and why. The most common motivation was readership: Researchers want other researchers to read their work.
That goal is served by publishing in journals that have wide readership, thanks to their prominence and reputation. Ease of discovery matters, too, as does reliable availability. In his 1997 preprint, Kitaev cited a 1984 paper in Physical Review Letters by Daniel Arovas, J. Robert Schrieffer, and Frank Wilczek. The paper, “Fractional statistics and the quantum Hall Effect,” was easily retrieved from the journal’s website. What’s more, by clicking on the “citing articles” tab, I could find and link to Kitaev’s 2003 Annals of Physics article.
Some physicists have told me that their biggest source of frustration when it comes to journals is not clunky article submission software, unhelpful referee reports, or publication delays. Rather, they complain about journal editors who fail to identify appropriate referees and who fail to mediate effectively in disputes between authors and referees.
Unusual Arctic fire activity in 2019–21 was driven by, among other factors, earlier snowmelt and varying atmospheric conditions brought about by rising temperatures.
January 06, 2023 12:00 AM
Get PT in your inbox
Physics Today - The Week in Physics
The Week in Physics" is likely a reference to the regular updates or summaries of new physics research, such as those found in publications like Physics Today from AIP Publishing or on news aggregators like Phys.org.
