News
Reports
Physics News
Donna Cromer
Les Editions de Physique [http://www.ed-phys.fr/] [web@ed-phys.fr] in cooperation with the European Physics Society is offering selected journals electronically via the Web for 1996. Full versions of Journal de Physique I, II, III, Annales de Physique, and Europhysics Letters are now available to "registered subscribers". The service is free to all subscribers of the paper version of the journals as a promotional offer for this year. The registration form was sent with the 1996 invoices, which means that some of us may not have received ours (as the invoices went to our vendors or to a central payment office).
There is also a problem for academic or research institutions of any size in that IP registration is being limited to three class C addresses (i.e., 3 levels of IP addresses). As of yet, Les Editions de Physique is not allowing "ranging" of the third-level addresses, which has worked with other physics and mathematics society publishers. It would be useful for many physics and interested librarians to e-mail this French association and explain the difficulties of such a "limite diabolique"! Journal de Physique IV has also been recently announced as available electronically, but this may be for contents and abstracts, rather than full-text.
Diane Fortner, UC Berkeley
Preprints on the Web
Has everyone tried the International Centre for Theoretical Physics,
Trieste, Italy's "One-Shot World-Wide Preprints Search"? This
can search all the scientific preprint repositories at the same time.
We at Fermilab (library staff and a number of physicists we've talked with)
think it works pretty well, though one can get too many and/or odd hits
sometimes.
Sara Tompson, Library Administrator
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Is there an APS refund in your future?
At the American Physical Society (APS) we have spot-checked our database and have discovered that there are institutional libraries that are paying more than they
need to for their subscriptions to APS journals. This situation has arisen where
libraries have subscribed unintentionally to the components of a package,
without having recognized that by ordering the package as such, they could
have saved money. For example, if your institution subscribes to Physical Review A through Physical Review E and Physical Review Index, you have overpaid $1320. A
similar situation occurs with APS-ALL (contact Maria Lebron for more information).
We are trying to identify the institutions affected and offer a refund for the overpayment. This is a time consuming manual process for us but you could help speed it up by checking your subscriptions and letting me know if your institution qualifies for a combination package refund. The refund offer expires 31 July 1996.
Maria L. Lebron
Associate Publisher
The American Physical Society