At 11:17 AM 12/23/01 +0000, Eberhard R. Hilf wrote: > >did you check our services? >PhysNet for the EPS: http://physnet.uni-oldenburg.de/PhysNet >
No, I diddn't but I have now. When I found that PhysNet is designed to make it easy to (among other things) harvest what is on the home pages of members of physics institutions, I concluded that APS might find no market for the service I had thought it should offer--namely, of posting authors' APS-formatted papers on arXve. This no-market scenario would be true if (1) Physicists that publish papers in APS journals post the PDF files of those papers on their home pages and do so in a timely fashion. (2) Papers so posted are as easily found through PhysNet (or very nearly so) as they would be on arXve. The test of (1) would be to go to recent issues of APS publications, find the home pages of a sample of authors, and see if they had posted the PDF files of their papers. I'll leave that test to APS market research; however, I went to the faculty list of University of Florida's Physics Department (http://www.phys.ufl.edu/faculty/faculty.html) and browsed a sample of their home pages for PDF files of their papers. A minority of UF physics faculty listed their publications on their home pages and a minority of these had links to the full texts of their papers. Nonetheless, I soon found three that had posted a PDF file of a recent article and two of these had posted APS-formatted files. I then tested (2) with this sample of three papers and failed to find any of the papers by using PhysNet--either by searching for the papers directly or by using PhysNet to go directly to the authors' home pages. Thus APS may have a market after all. A substantial portion of physicists who publish in APS journals may be willing to pay APS a fair price to facilitate free access to their APS-formatted papers and to relieve them of having to update their home pages with bibliographic entries and links each time they publish. Postscript: Although I failed to find any of the papers with PhysNet, I quickly found two with Google (http://www.google.com). Google displayed a URL for the PDF file of the third paper as well, but it was no longer the correct one. Below are the three papers, their URLs, and the search string [in brackets] that I used to find it in Google. S. G. Bompadre, Arthur F. Hebard, Valeri N. Kotov, Donavan Hall, G. Maris, J. Baas, and T. T. M. Palstra. 2000. Spin-Peierls transition in NaV2O5 in high magnetic fields. Physical Review B 61(20) R13321. http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~afh/nav2o5.pdf [hebard "spin-peierls transition"] C. Wexler and Alan T. Dorsey. 2001. Disclination unbinding transition in quantum Hall liquid crystals. Physical Review B 64(11) 115312. http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~dorsey/papers/prb64_115312.pdf [dorsey "disclination unbinding transition"] S.J. Hagen, C.W. Carswell, and E.M. Sjolander. 2001. Rate of intrachain contact formation in an unfolded protein: temperature and denaturant effects. Journal of Molecular Biology 305:1161-1171. http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~hagen/pubs/jmb_2001.pdf [hagen "rate of intrachain contact"] [Google returned the dead link http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~hagen/jmb_2001.pdf for this paper] Tom Walker ======================================================================== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology and Nematology University of Florida E-mail: [email protected] PO Box 110620 FAX: 352-392-0190 Gainesville FL 32611-0620 Phone: 352-392-1901 ext. 125 Homepage: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/ =========================================================================
