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CLOSING REMARKS

Bob Kelly's Remarks

I would just like to add my two cents to the whole thing. I think the things that have come out of this session today, are the need for cooperation, the need for sharing, and the need for a lot of short, small experiments. I want us to work together and to try a lot of the ideas we heard out there today. The e-print archive service, is going to be setup on the APS homepage. I extend it to you live, for a long time and it will be the vehicle of discussion, if you will, for employing these experiments. I would also like to collect any papers that anybody would like to put up on it as a discussion.

So, I'd like to introduce Ben so he can close it down and then we're off to the restaurant.

Ben Bederson's Remarks

I thought this was a great meeting. First of all, it was short and I love short meetings. Also, I found myself interested in virtually everything that was said and I come away with a lot of ideas.

So, I want to end by listing not the conclusions that we came to but rather the questions which were addressed at this meeting. Our editors will be discussing what happened here in depth, I assure you. None of this is going to be lost.

Here are some of the questions and tentative answers which I ended up with:

  • Does the traditional journal, printed or otherwise, have a future? Yes, at least for five years.
  • Will E-print archives spread throughout physics? Definitely.
  • Will peer-review survive in something like its present form? Most likely.
  • Will copyright intellectual property rights survive in their present form? Probably not.
  • Will technology continue to explode at the rate that it has in the past few years? If so, it's almost inconceivable to guess what we'll be doing five years from now. Yes, and definitely.
  • Will hypertext connect the full physics literature? In other words, Will we have a full physics library? Yes, but not for a while.
  • Will libraries survive in their present form? Survive, yes; present form, probably not.
  • What will be the role of the APS and how will APS link to other societies? To be determined.
  • How will we both "survive" (as Harry Lustig rightly worries about) and at the same time, do what's right by physics? That's why we're here!