American Physical Society journals have always kept up with changes in publishing methodology and technology. The idea of a broad physics journal with significant peer review was an innovation when The Physical Review first published in 1893. Physical Review Letters began with three new ideas: A journal comprised wholly of Letters, typewriter composition, and photolithographic printing.
I address these issues from a personal perspective, via a brief account of my encounters with some of the changes that have taken place over the 50 years of PRL, years that overlap my own quite closely. Those of us this age and older did things that are no longer common. We used slide rules, and log and trig tables. We dialed Bakelite phones on party lines, and fixed TVs by replacing tubes.
My parents met at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. By the mid 1960s my father had moved to Goddard Space Flight Center, abuzz with the Apollo program, and my mother was at the University of Maryland. One of them brought home a Wang calculator, about half the size of a typewriter, with a large Nixie tube display. It would add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and also calculate square roots, logs, cosines, etc.! My parents told me, an 11-year-old, not to break the government’s expensive miraculous device. Six years on, near my high school graduation, most students had a small calculator that would do more. Slide rules were gone.
Early in my school experience there were no photocopiers. Tests were printed on duplicator machines, which used wax templates and organic solvents to produce bad copies that got fainter as more were produced. When photocopiers appeared, initially they used liquid toner, which could leak onto your original. There was such a copier in the physics department at the time of my first involvement in submittal of a manuscript, to PRB, as an undergraduate. Copying was risky.
We wrote the manuscript long hand, on a legal pad, and then someone in the physics office typed it on an IBM Selectric, which produced Greek and other characters via changes in ball. We revised by retyping entire pages, or retyping sections, pasting them in, and photocopying the result. We drew the figures by hand, traced them in India ink, and did lettering with a Leroy lettering set of pens and templates. Finally, we mailed the manuscript to the APS editorial office, along with black-and-white photographs of the figures. Soon IBM PCs appeared, only to be replaced soon in our department by Macs, which had nice graphics as well as word processing. Handwritten manuscripts and India-ink drawings were gone.
When I reached the APS’s editorial office in 1990, there were some typed and a few handwritten manuscripts, but most were computer generated, and all arrived by mail. Referee reports also arrived by mail or by fax. Within a year or two authors and referees could submit electronically, but we still printed everything and stored it in a paper file. Physical Review Letters was still laid out by paste-up artists, who cut the manuscripts up and pasted them on blue boards for the printer. We needed an electronic page layout to make the journal available electronically, however, and hired an outside vendor to allow PRL to go online in 1995, followed quickly by the Physical Review journals. The paste-up artists were gone.
The electronic contribution to peer review and publication continued to grow. Shortly after 2000 all correspondence was stored in the database, and by 2005, paper was gone. We now work from our screens, from almost anywhere, which is a mixed blessing.
It is difficult to predict what the next big changes will be. It sometimes appears to me that there is nothing left to modernize in the process, but surely this is illusory. New ideas and technology will appear, publishing will change, and the APS will stay at the forefront.
