Moderator: Bob Kelly (APS, JIS Director)

Bob Kicks-Off the APS E-Print Workshop

The agenda for today is well packed with a whole series of panels. You've all seen copies of the agenda. As usual, we are slightly behind schedule already. I am going to kick off the Current Thinking panel and I'll introduce the panel in a moment and then we will go through a break followed by the Intellectual Properties panel moderated by Maria Lebron. After that, we'll go into lunch. Lunch will be served outside in the same place where the breakfast is so we can continue discussing while we're eating. There will be a session on Tracking of Papers lead by Peggy Judd from AIP, a session on Peer Review lead by Ben Bederson and the final session on Society Wide Strategy lead by Michael Turner. An open discussion will follow where, if anybody has papers that they wish to present, and there are several, that would be an opportunity to do that using any of the technologies that we have available including a video, VCR and a TV in the back of me. We'll go with that through open discussion and then we'll wrap up by Ben Bederson. We're all invited to dinner at De Colores restaurant which is just down the road here in Los Alamos.

I'll say a few words about what we're doing in APS and then I'm going to turn it over to my panel. Over the past year, we at APS have adopted a strategy that is based upon the concept that we're custodians of the manuscripts and that we're driving our publishing process to where we can provide choices in the way that readers read and writers write, and the heart of the strategy is based on SGML. As of today, Physical Review Letters are composed entirely in SGML using ISO12083 and we're doing that in partnership with the European Physical Society, AIP, the Optical Society and other physical societies who are all working toward SGML standard for the production, for the storing, and the archiving of the journals. That's not to say we're publishing SGML, that's to say that we're archiving in that fashion and that's our choice. The idea is to provide choices. Choices of how information comes in and choices of how information goes out, but with choices now and choices in the future.

We are, as an example, using this SGML in negotiating with two commercial vendors to distribute the PRL over the Internet and hopefully, by this time next year, we will have at least one deliverable of PRL going out electronically. We are also using the SGML to participate with the University of Illinois and NCSA in the Digital Library experiment. The University of Illinois and NCSA were one of the winners of the grant that NSF had put out for the Digital Library experiment and it's our intent to work with them to look at ways to use SGML in a library environment for using Mosaic and other various applications. It is also our attempt to develop ways to encourage writers to submit manuscripts in a wide variety of ways like TeX, WordPerfect, and then to publish them in a wide variety of ways. And what we're doing, really, is using a baseball metaphor and I've said this many times, but our approach is to do a lot of base hits because we really don't know the topology of the future.

As Paul pointed out last night, "The times, they are a changin'." We've got a couple of years to change with the times and it's our intent to take small steps that will drive us into a position where we can both capitalize on and take advantage of the changes in the future. What our goal is, is to look at ways to involve the reader earlier in the cycle. To look at the current publishing process of writer, colleague, peer review, editor, producer, printer and distributor and finally librarian and reader and say they're using technology. Now we can find new ways to involve the reader earlier and earlier in the cycle to further our goal of diffusing and disseminating information and that's what the purpose of the current thinking panel is all about. To look at ways that people are thinking of involving the reader earlier in the game, involving the reader earlier in the process, to diffuse and disseminate information earlier and earlier under the theory that that's better for science.

So what I'd like to do is introduce the current thinking panel and this is the order that they will be speaking and I'll just introduce all of them now and we can work our way through it. The intent is to have each speaker have about ten minutes and then open it up to an individual if there are any questions to any of the speakers for one or two minutes and then to open it up for general discussion later on in my two hour slot for any other questions that come up and to be addressed to the entire panel.

I'm going to kick the panel off. I've got it stacked in such a way that we end with the last four or five speakers of the panel as working physicists and I'd like to end my session with people who are actually users, writers and readers in the process and the importance of that. But, first let me introduce Pat Kreitz. Pat is at SLAC and is managing the process out in SLAC for preprints. Pat, I'd like you to come up and give us a talk and then we'll introduce the others as we go along. Thank you, thanks for being here. Let's move it into the future!