By: Hannah Pell “The American Physical Society (APS) has a vision of the future of physics publishing, in 2020 or so.” So begins a 1993 Science article titled “ Publication by Electronic Mail Takes Physics by Storm .” Burton Richter, then-president of APS and former head of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), elaborated: “Any physicist, any place in the country, can turn on his computer and for free browse through the table of contents of any APS journal. [The browser] can select those things about which he wants to see an abstract, and then, after deciding what he might read, ask for the article itself and eventually pay for it like you pay your telephone bill.” What was then a vision would in fact be our reality in 2020. In the early 1990s, physicists were on the cutting edge of revolutionizing how academic papers were shared and published. Scientists were then working within a context of seismic shifts in computational technology and seeing the early foundations of th
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