Free Condensed Matter Physics seminar in which Yiming Xu discusses the editorial and peer-review process of the open-access physics journal PRX.
Yiming Xu is speaking at Wean Hall on Tuesday, October 27, for the Condensed Matter Physics seminar. The talk is titled The Character of PRX: Editorial Insights from the First 15 Years and Beyond, and it's less about a specific physics discovery and more about how the scientific record actually gets made.
Xu is an editor at PRX, the open-access journal of the American Physical Society. The APS is a nonprofit membership society of scientists, and PRX is its high-profile journal, which selects around 250 landmark papers a year from across all fields of physics to showcase to a broad, multidisciplinary readership. The whole point of the journal is to highlight the kind of work that reaches across specialties, so the editors have to look for papers that matter even to people who aren't working in that exact niche.
That's where the talk comes in. For more than 15 years, the editors at PRX have been grappling with how to define what a "landmark" paper actually is through the peer-review process, and how to select those papers alongside authors and referees. Xu is drawing on that experience to pull back the curtain on how the editorial and peer-review process is approached from the inside. His main argument is that open-minded, reasoned, and constructive dialogue among authors, editors, and referees is the key to getting it right.
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If you've ever wondered what happens to a paper after it's submitted—how the editors decide what's a "landmark" and how they navigate the back-and-forth between the authors and the referees—this is exactly that. It's a look at the human side of scientific publishing. The talk is free and takes place at Wean Hall, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213.
