Recent Updates and Announcements from Physical Review

["Barbara Hicks" <hicks@aps.org>]

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