The referee reports are in and you’re faced with a familiar situation: they are positive, hooray, but there is an ambiguous suggestion which you don’t quite understand. What follows is a lot of second-guessing, a number of meetings with your co-authors, lengthy editing of the paper to implement whatever you think the referees wanted you to do, a letter to the editor in which you explain that you didn’t quite understand, but that you assumed it was X and that you tried to answer it as best as you could and so on.

As often as not, you assumed wrongly which either leads to another round in which the referees tell you that what they in fact meant was not X but, (often again in ambiguous terms) indeed Y and that you should better fix Y this time or else…

Another familiar situation is that you’re the referee. You’re reviewing this paper and you think it is great but that the explanation offered by the authors is quite unclear. You’re not quite sure whether that is due to your lack of expertise in that exact field or whether it’s just not very well written. Then you try your best to express your concerns but again, it’s not exactly your field, so how can you be expected to give accurate advice, and also, you have better things to do than these people’s homework.

I don’t know how much research time and thus funding money goes down the drain in the ensuing prolonged review process but it must be significant. So what is the solution to all this? In my opinion it’s quite simple: allow the referee or the authors to talk to each other. Just imagine how gloriously straightforward it would be in example 1 to contact a reviewer to ask him what precisely he was suggesting. In example 2, a couple of question would be enough to find out whether the paper needed improvement or your understanding of physics.

The refereeing process, of course, is single-blind. The email contact would have to be handled by the journal, which nowadays has a powerful online portal for publication management anyway. How do you avoid abuse, e.g. authors bombarding their referees with messages? You install a unilateral opt-out system, or limit the number of emails that can be exchanged per refereeing round. Even people who get arrested are allowed a phone call, right? Or people on TV game shows. Why not scientists?

I think this is a brilliant idea, but is it ever going to be implemented? The handful of readers who randomly stumble upon my idle musings on this website will probably not take to the streets and bring about the required revolution. I’m going to use a trick. Last time I posted about the upcoming APS open-access journal Physical Review X (PRX), the APS contacted me within hours to point out a factual error in my post. This wasn’t because their editors are avid readers of this blog but because they had set up a Google alert for keywords involving their new journal. In the hope that this alert is still active, I now invoke the power of Google to get my idea across:

Dear anonymous APS editor or underling who happens to check the hundreds of alerts which are created for PRX every minute,

I hereby suggest to implement a limited messaging system between referees and authors. The best place to start would be your new journal Physical Review X. I’m sure the suggested feature would create a lot of interest in the community.

Sincerely,

Me

For those who haven’t seen it yet, there are two new journals, the American Institue of Physics’ (AIP) AIP Advances and American Physical Society’s (APS) Physical Review X (PRX). Both are representative of a recent trend for traditional publishers to move to open access, online-only publishing models. Another example would be Nature Communications, a journal recently launched by the Nature Publishing Group.

AIP Advances supposedly focuses on applied physics with the promise on rapid publication. A quick look at the papers in their first issue confirms this claim to some extent. There are fourteen papers and the average time between submission and acceptance was around 6 weeks. The longest time was 9 weeks and the shortest just one week. Given that most papers were reviewed during the Christmas break, this is certainly an achievement. It will be interesting to see whether they can keep up this speed once they receive more submissions. The sample size is so far not large enough to allow a clear picture of the eventual content of AIP Advances. The term “applied” does certainly not fit all of the papers in the first issue. The fee for publication in AIP Advances is 1350 USD.

While the first issue of AIP Advances just appeared, PRX has only just issued their call for papers will announce their first call for papers later this month. Issue one is expected to appear in (northern-hemisphere) fall 2011. The scope of PRX is as broad as Physical Review Letters itself, so all fields of physics are covered, including some which formerly might not have fit into the more traditional APS Physical Review publications, especially interdisciplinary research. This sounds a little bit like the scope of Nature Communications and I can imagine that the APS is trying to position PRX to counter the success of both Nature Communications and the increasingly popular New Journal of Physics, which also has an open access model. Publishing in PRX will hit your (or your funding agency’s) wallet for 1500 USD.

In addition, there is now the option to choose open access for most APS journals. The papers will be published under the Creative Commons license. The fees are 1700 USD for Physical Review papers and 2700 USD for Physical Review Letters.

EDIT: In my original post, I had foolishly assumed that the AIP was part of APS publishing. Gene Sprouse, the APS editor in chief has kindly pointed out this mistake to me.