Physical Review - History

History

Physical Review commenced publication in July 1893, organized by Cornell University professor Edward Nichols and helped by the new President of Cornell, J. Gould Schurman. The journal was managed and edited at Cornell in upstate New York from 1893 to 1913 by Nichols, Ernest Merritt, and Frederick Bedell. The 33 volumes published during this time constitute Physical Review Series I.

The American Physical Society (APS), founded in 1899, took over its publication in 1913 and started Physical Review Series II. The journal remained at Cornell under editor G. S. Fulcher from 1913 to 1926, before relocating to the location of Editor John Torrence Tate at the University of Minnesota. In 1929, the APS started publishing Reviews of Modern Physics, a venue for longer review articles.

During the Great Depression, wealthy scientist Alfred Loomis anonymously paid the journal's fees for authors who could not afford them.

After Tate's death in 1950, the journals were managed on an interim basis still in Minnesota by E. L. Hill and J. William Buchta until Samuel Goudsmit and Simon Pasternack were appointed and the editorial office moved to the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on the east end of Long Island, New York. In July 1958, the sister journal Physical Review Letters was introduced to publish short articles of particularly broad interest, initially edited by George L. Trigg, who remained as Editor until 1988.

In 1970, Physical Review split into sub-journals Physical Review A, B, C, and D. A fifth member of the family, Physical Review E, was introduced in 1993 to a large part to accommodate the huge amount of new research in nonlinear dynamics. Combined, these constitute Physical Review Series III.

The editorial office moved in 1980 to its present location across the street from BNL. Goudsmit retired in 1974 and Pasternack in the mid-1970s. B. Chalmers-Frazer was Managing Editor from 1974 until 1980, helped by Robert K. Adair and James Krumhansl. Past Editors-in-Chief include David Lazarus (1980—1990), from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Benjamin Bederson (1990—1996), from New York University, and Martin Blume (1996—2007), from BNL. The current Editor In Chief is Gene Sprouse from SUNY, Stony Brook.

To celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the journal, a memoir was published jointly by the APS and AIP.

In 1998, the first issue of Physical Review Special Topics: Accelerators and Beams was published, and in 2005, Physical Review Special Topics: Physics Education Research was launched) . Physical Review also started an online magazine, Physical Review Focus, in 1998 to explain, and provide historical context for, selected articles from Physical Review and Physical Review Letters. The Special Topics journals are open access; Physics Education Research requires page charges from the authors, but Physical Review Special Topics: Accelerators and Beams does not. Though not open access, Physical Review Letters also requires an author page charge, although this is voluntary. The other journals require such a charge only if they are not prepared in one of the preferred formats. Authors can pay extra charges to make their papers open access. Such papers are published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY), the most permissive of the CC licenses, which permits authors and others to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the work, provided that proper credit is given. Physical Review Letters celebrated their 50th birthday in 2008. The APS has a copyright policy to permit the author to reuse parts of the published article in a derivative or new work, including on Wikipedia.

The APS has a publication entitled Physics, aiming to help physicists and physics students to learn about new developments outside of their own subfield. It also publishes Physical Review X (PRX), an online-only, fully open access journal. It is a highly selective peer-reviewed journal that aims to publish, as timely as possible, exceptional original research papers from all areas of pure, applied, and interdisciplinary physics.