Ken Brown suggests the following solution to the Physical Review Letters “problem”:
I think a possibl[ity] is to make it so no one can submit to PRL. Instead the editors/refs can choose to bump your paper up from PRX. Then the PRX paper would be published in full and the PRL would be a short summary(intro and conclusions) with the details left in PRX.
This is a really intriguing idea. There must be something wrong with it, but I can’t see it right now. One small problem, I think, is that as the system is currently set up, when I submit a paper to Phys. Rev. A, there is usually only one referee for the paper and it seems a bit much to put all of the discission making in two peoples hands (one ref, one editor.)
In quantum optics it was common for a lot of the 80s and 90s for people to submit PRLs that were short on detail and to promise the referees and editors that they would submit a paper to PRA with all the missing stuff included. Phys Rev were pretty happy with this situation as far as I have been able to tell.
Another solution could be to switch the PRL format to be more like that of Nature’s. They could introduce a “supplementary materials” section for papers that really need more than 4 pages to get a good idea about the work (at the suggestion of the referees).
Not to derail the topic, but I feel quite lucky in our field that basically everything comes out on the arxiv. As long as the field is small enough that everyone can sift through the arxiv postings by themselves, there’s not a major need for an external filtering system. This will change, of course. Who’s thinking about arxiv 2.0? I’d like to see a version with referred postings, and then some kind of filtering like slashdot (not comments like slashdot, mind you!). it’s more or less part of our professional responsibility to review papers. Not to say that it’ll happen…