News
Physics News
H. Sylvia Toombs
The American Physical Society (APS) has made Physical Review Letters online (PRLo) available on the web using a new Verity search engine. Physical Review C online and PRLo may be searched using either the simple or advanced mode which allows for Boolean logic, proximity operators and field searching. Results can be sorted chronologically, by journal title or relevancy ranking. Although PRLo currently includes only material dating from December 1996 to current, it is expected that 1995 and 1996 records will be loaded and made available by April 1997. Any questions, comments or suggestions about this system may be directed to Mina Chung, Associate Publisher, American Physical Society.
IOP JOURNALS
The Institute of Physics (IOP) has several announcements for the Physics library community:
*Beginning January 1, 1997 Physics Express Letters (PEL) was made available to everyone free of charge. PEL includes the letters and rapid communications from 12 IoP journals. Documents are full text and available in HTML, PDF or PostScript formats. (http://www.iop.org)
*Accelerated Publications allows researchers to view an article immediately after it has been refereed, accepted for publication and edited. The articles will be published in paper format, but the electronic version becomes available long before the paper version is printed, bound and distributed. Depending on the printed frequency (i.e. weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, etc.), Accelerated Publication and Forthcoming Articles can help when researchers need to read papers or complete bibliographical information for paper submission.
*Electronic journal access is available using release Version 2.0 on the web. The enhancements allow:
1. registration of domain name in addition to the former IP addresses.
2. no longer requiring user names or passwords for online access. Although names and passwords allow users to take advantage of additional functions for mail and saved search functions.
3. improved search engine providing Boolean searching, author, title, Physics-Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS) code for more specific retrieval.
4. remote access service which "allows users affiliated with a registered institution to access the service from any computer in the world."
INSPEC and IOP
In Spring 1997 a joint venture for IOP and INSPEC will enable users of IOP's electronic journals to select any journal reference and retrieve the INSPEC abstract. The entire database of INSPEC abstracts from 1969 will be made available for this linkage along with IOP's HyperCite (TM) service.
An initially anticipated advantage to this linkage will be linking cited references to IoP's full text electronic journals with the eventual inclusion of other physics publishers.
APS NEWS
The American Physical Society's newsletter, APS News, is available on the web. The most current issue is accessible only to APS members, but archived issues going back to 1995 are available for nonmembers. The November 1996 section entitled APS online has a special issue devoted to electronic publications and is well worth looking at. Thanks to Molly White for her posting on January 7 and bringing this source to everyone's attention.