The demise of IOP SciNotes

 I just noticed that the journal IOP SciNotes has announced its closure.  It's a shame, as I though the basic idea of the journal was good:  as a place to deposit small units of research that are not suitable for publication as a full paper but which would otherwise be lost to the research record.  Since the website for the journal does not include instructions for authors any more, I cannot see the list of example cases that are (were) suitable for the journal, but they were things like prelimimary results; repeated results; desriptions of a new method, protocol, or data; negative results; or registered methodologies for a new piece of research.  I published one thing there:  A note on how to use a major existing code that I coauthored for a new purpose by making a slight adjustment to it [P D Stevenson, IOP SciNotes 1, 025201].  It definitely did not seem like a full paper's worth of content, and I would not have expected a regular nuclear physics journal to accept it, but it seemed to hit the mark for this journal (as a description of a new method or protocol).

If the journal was a good idea, why has it failed?  I don't know about any of the discussions that took place about it, or what the rate of submission is, but it seems to me like there are rather few papers submitted and published of the sort the editors had in mind, and instead a lot of essentially full papers reporting full projects whose results and scope and interest are perhaps too modest to be of interest to a regular journal.   The subject area spread permitted in the journal was enormous - essentially all areas of science (except astronomy), and so a reader from any specific discipline or subfield was never going to get in the habit of browsing the journal to look for relevant papers.  Anything published there would have to be advertised by the author for the rest of the relevant research community to know about.  And then ... it is an open access journal with article processing charges (APC).  I submitted my paper during the initial period when there was not fee to publish there, presumably in order to kick-start the new journal.  More recently one had to find the APC in order to publish, which no doubt put people off, especially when high impact research is by definition not going to be sent there.   

It was on my to-do list to submit a short note describing a code to decompose real square matrices into tensor products of Pauli matrices that a summer student worked on, and which we stuck on arXiv (2111.00627).  With the current IoP Publishing agreement with UK Universities, there would have been no APC to pay (by me at least).  Now I guess I will just leave it in the arXiv. which is ... fine in any case, and more findable that if I just published in SciNotes without putting it on the arXiv. 

Here's the one figure from my IOP SciNotes paper - the potential between two interacting O-16 nuclei as a function of separation