The following are recent Updates and Announcements from
Physical
Review and Physical Review Letters. For a demonstration of
any
of these new features, please visit us at Special Libraries
Association (SLA) booth #645, June 15-18, 2008 in Seattle,
Washington.
Topical Cross-journal RSS Feeds
As a convenience to readers, APS now provides topical
cross-journal RSS feeds. The initial feeds cover graphene,
magnetic semiconductors, metal-insulator transitions,
metamaterials, photonic crystals, plasmonics, spintronics,
and
strong correlations in one dimension. They can be
subscribed to
via feeds.aps.org. New topics are added periodically.
Update of APS Journal Websites
Starting with Physical Review Letters (prl.aps.org) on
January 1,
the APS journal homepages, PROLA, and other related pages
have
been updated. Visitors are now presented with clean, easily
navigable interfaces that permit quick access to the current
issue(s), a particular citation, and searching.
PRB Kaleidoscope: http://prb.aps.org/
Images from recently published Physical Review B papers are
now
featured on prb.aps.org in a feature named, 'Kaleidoscope'.
Images do not appear on the print version of the journal.
Selection is based purely on aesthetic merit. Older images
may
be found in an online archive.
PRB Editors' Suggestions
As a service to both readers and authors, starting on April
1,
Physical Review B began formally listing a small number of
papers
published by the journal that the editors and referees found
to
be of particular interest, importance, or clarity. These
Editors' Suggestions papers are listed on prb.aps.org and
marked
with a special icon in the print and online Tables of
Contents
and in online searches. The icon contains the printers mark
that
appeared on the covers of all sections of the Physical
Review
until about a decade ago. Physical Review Letters launched
a
similar program in January 2007.
PRL 50th Anniversary: http://prl.aps.org/
Physical Review Letters, started by Editor Sam Goudsmit as
an
experiment, reaches its 50th anniversary in July 2008. This
occasion is being marked in several ways throughout the
year.
Via a series of Editorials, appearing approximately once per
month, editors are engaging more in discussion of the
critical
issues facing both APS journals and scientific publishing
generally, and possible actions in response. Some also
include a
look back at the issues facing PRL in its early days, and
compare
those to current concerns. A series of Essays, written by
physicists who played a leading role in the physics world
during
PRL's 50 years are also appearing. They cover research,
publishing, and science policy-past, present, and even
future.
The Essays broaden the content of the journal, and provide
some
insight into the impact of PRL on individual physicists and
their
careers, as well as on the wider community and on physics
research itself.
External to the published journal, sessions are being held
at
various meetings within and outside the U.S. These include
presentations about both the history of the journal itself
and
the history of the physics that has been reported in its
pages.
Additional material is also available online. In
particular, a
timeline of events associated with PRL that begins over 100
years
ago, with the birth of The Physical Review, and includes
links to
descriptions of various events in publishing and in physics
research, and also in the world at large, for context. Also
online, a series of milestone Letters that made long-lived
contributions to physics, either by announcing significant
discoveries, or by initiating new areas of research, are
being
highlighted. A number of these articles report on work that
was
later recognized with a Nobel Prize for one or more of the
authors. Starting the week of January 2, a few important
Letters
from PRL in 1958 were presented, with the next week from
1959,
etc., continuing up through the year 2000. The Editor of
this
PRL retrospective is Martin Blume, past Editor-in-Chief of
the
APS.
Which Wei Wang?
APS journals receive manuscripts from scientists all over
the
world. For authors whose names cannot be expressed in Latin
characters, their names in the byline must be
transliterated, a
process that is not necessarily bidirectionally unique. For
example, the eight Chinese names [OMITTED CHARACTERS] all
transliterate as Wei Wang. To remove some of the ambiguity
arising from this unfortunate degeneracy of names, APS now
allows
(Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) authors, whose names can be
expressed in Unicode characters, the option to include their
names in their own language in parentheses after the
transliterated name. As we gain experience, we may be able
to
broaden this initiative to other languages.
APS Outstanding Referees
http://
prb.aps.org/OutstandingRefereesRelease A highly
selective
award program was initiated to recognize scientists, who
have
been exceptionally helpful in assessing manuscripts for
publication in the APS journals, as Outstanding Referees.
The
program will annually recognize 130 of the 42,000 currently
active referees, but in this inaugural year a larger group
of 534
referees was selected. Like Fellowship in the APS, this is
a
lifetime award. Ceremonies were held at the APS March and
April
Meetings, with similar events planned at other APS meetings
during the year.
For further information please contact:
Barbara Hicks, Associate Publisher/Director of Marketing
American Physical Society
One Physics Ellipse
College Park, MD 20740
Telephone: 301-209-3202
Fax: 301-209-0844
Email: hicks aps.org
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