Physics Views on Publishing

Not Even Wrong has a post on the future of scientific publication and open access with a good assessment of the costs involved. What makes this a particularly good read is the collection of over 50 comments mainly from the physics and math communities.

The point is made several times that the arXiv experiment in chemistry, the Elsevier Chemistry Preprint server, was a failure. I actually published multiple times using that vehicle and it was indeed a shame when they shut down. This was a totally free model - for authors and readers - and authors kept their copyright. Here is the explanation of why they shut it down.

Despite the wide readership of CPS preprints, the chemistry community has unfortunately not contributed articles or online comments to this service in sufficient numbers to justify further development. The decision has therefore been taken to stop the processing of any further submissions.