Nature Physics

The first issue of Nature Physics is out (which was where the article by Brassard on information and quantum theory appeared.) From the opening letter from the editor

Authors may be pleased to know that manuscripts can be submitted to Nature Physics not only in Microsoft Word, but in LaTeX too.

Which caused me to almost fall out of my chair laughing. Welcome to the modern world, Nature publishing.

4 Replies to “Nature Physics”

  1. I appreciated this sentence from later in the same paragraph:
    Among the Letters and Articles in each of our issues, you will find some very elegant equations…
    Truly after our hearts, those Nature Physics people are!

  2. It’s not a veiled threat, rather it’s a lame fret.
    I know that there are reporters who look at arXiv papers. I don’t know if they look on their own or if they get tipped off, but in any case they look. I’ve seen articles in the New York Times science section refer to arXiv articles.
    Not that this really “dilutes” anything.

  3. From the same editorial:

    Something that isn’t a new development, but a policy shared by all Nature titles, is that we do not object to papers being posted on preprint servers. We would only advise that, if you do so ahead of publication of your manuscript in Nature Physics, you risk diluting the impact of your paper in the media and the wider scientific community. But preprint servers — arXiv.org in particular — are integral to the working life of physicists. Far from banning any posting, we applaud the communication that the servers foster among researchers.

    Which is a veiled threat as far as I can tell. Are they trying to tell me, reading between the lines, that I shouldn’t post to ArXiv?
    I suppose one could argue that posting to the arxiv could dilute the media attention that Nature is so famous for, but are there actually science reporters who are actually reading the arxiv? I’m skeptical considering the number of times I’ve seen papers on the arxiv that only receive attention _after_ they have been fed through the Nature media machine. And even if there are, does the fact that one science reporter reports on the paper before the Nature herd reports really dillute the attention?
    Just asking.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *