AIP Publishing

The opinions and idiosyncrasies expressed in this post are mine and should not be attributed to the organizations I work for. The older I get, the more I realize that what makes our work fun is not only a meaningful mission but also the people we work with (see Exhibit A below). I spent the weekend in Long Island with about 50 journal editors, journal managers, and members of the American Institute of Physics Publishing's (AIP Publishing AIPP) executive team (see all the smiling faces in Exhibit A). Everyone there had given up their weekends to get together (many have other jobs, so weekday meetings are not feasible) to discuss how to enable authors to share their research and ideas better. There was no shortage of topics, from the role of AI to how to make submission easier and dissemination more global than ever. The discussion was lively. AIPP portfolio curates over 40 journals spanning the physical sciences, including all the APL Journals (APL, APL Materials, APL Quantum, APL Machine Learning, etc.) and journals that have been around for decades, such as the Journal of Applied Physics, the Journal of Chemical Physics, and the Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology, which I edit. AIPP journals publish tens of thousands of articles each year and interact with many more authors and reviewers. They do it all in the service of the authors and the physical sciences. Nonprofit scholarly publishers and society journals are crucial because their primary mission is to advance science for the benefit of humanity, not to maximize profits for shareholders. This means that any financial surplus is reinvested back into the scientific ecosystem to benefit researchers and the public, extending their impact far beyond the pages of their journals. For example, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) directly supports the physical sciences community by providing career resources, preserving the history of physics, and engaging in science policy advocacy through programs like the Congressional Science Policy Fellowships. Ultimately, it all goes back into the scientific enterprise. Many authors do not realize the difference between for-profit and nonprofit publishers and base their publishing decisions on superficial metrics such as the impact factor and the transient presumed glamor of having published in X. I have decided a long time ago to publish only with nonprofit society publishers. I only break this rule when my coauthors and collaborators insist and I cannot convince them otherwise. Perhaps it is easier for me to take this position. After all, my Nth paper has only a delta or epsilon effect on my career, and it is harder for researchers at the beginning of their careers to make this choice. I fully understand the need to include that X paper on your CV, since some people value it and look for it. All I am proposing is what if we changed our value system?