发表论文的规范

我在The Book People Mailing List上看到一个帖子，谈到了发表论文的问题。下面我就把它翻译出来。我对这个帖子想法很多，以后会再专门写一篇文章，谈谈我对国内学术体制的感想。

先是Allen Kleiman提问：

有一件事，我想知道：在那些主要的科研机构评选终身教职的过程中，哪些开放式期刊会被接受？哪些期刊会被认为代表了高质量的学术成果？

One thing I would like to know is which open access journals are accepted by major institutions as credit for tenure and which journals are considered as representations of good work in evaluating grant proposals.

Ben Crowell回答：

就我所知，没有哪所学校规定评选终身教职的参考期刊目录。当然，公认的做法是你发表论文的期刊必须得到同行的认可，有一些期刊被公认是权威期刊。

I'm not aware of any schools that have specific lists of journals that are acceptable for building a case for tenure. Of course it's the norm that you publish in a peer-reviewed journal, and some journals are considered more prestigious than others.

但是，我想开放式学术期刊同这个问题没有多少相关性。通常，人们不会只把论文发表在像PLOS或arxiv.org这样的免费在线系统上。下面是通行的做法：

But I think that has very little relevance here. People generally don't publish a paper solely via a free online system such as PLOS or arxiv.org. Generally what they do is the following:

- 在网上张贴预印本。
- 向传统期刊提交正式论文。
- 当传统期刊接受你的论文的时候，通常匿名评审会要求做出修改，有些是小改，有些是大改。作者完成修改，在网上张贴修改后的版本，同时将其提交给出版商。
- 论文正式公开发表。接着，它会出现在图书馆和订户那里，本领域的专家已经知道了结果，在网上已经读过论文了。

- Post a preprint on the online system.
- Submit the paper to a traditional journal.
- Typically when the paper is accepted by the traditional journal, the referees request changes, which may be major or minor. The authors make those changes, and post a revised version of the paper on the online system at the same time they send it to the publisher.
- The paper appears in print. By the time it arrives in libraries and mailboxes, specialists in the field already know about the result, and have read the paper online.

这种做法已经在物理学界采用了几十年了。生命科学也正在采用这种做法。Arxiv没有传统的匿名评审，但这个关系不大，因为这个系统并不打算替代传统的期刊。

The physicists have been doing this for decades now via arxiv.org. The life sciences are playing catch-up. Arxiv doesn't do traditional peer reviewing, but that doesn't matter, because it's not meant to substitute for traditional peer reviewing.

有一些优秀的研究人员会不采用传统的做法，只把论文放上arxiv.org，这也是事实。我想这通常发生在一些快速变化的理论领域，而且那些论文只有一个作者，且这个作者已经获得了终身教职。这样做的人应该非常少，也许将来也是一直如此。

It is true that a few respected researchers bypass the traditional system completely and simply post their papers on arxiv.org. Typically I think this happens in fast-moving theoretical fields, for papers that have only one author, who already has tenure. The number of people doing this, however, is very small, and probably always will be.

（完）

UPDATE（2007.2.7）

Allen Kleiman今天回信了，他说在他所在的纽约城市大学（the City University of New York），评审终身教职基本上只看在重要的刊物上发表的论文。在那里，只有评上了终身教职，"一个人才能将他的智慧与全世界分享。这里的格言是'不发表就是死亡'"（After one gets tenure one can devote himself or herself to sharing with the world one's wisdom. Until then one is reminded of the "publish or perish" maxim）。