1998 APS Annual Report

Like many previous years, 1997 was another exciting year for physics. Major progress was reported in many fields of physics, including the observation of neutrino oscillations, studies of entanglement with application to quantum computing and long-distance teleportation, continued progress on Bose-Einstein Condensation, the fabrication of nano-electromechanical systems (NEMS), study of vortices and turbulence, and study of the accelerated expansion of the universe.

The last year was also an exciting year for the American Physical Society. Under the excellent direction of our Executive Officer, Treasurer and Editor-in-Chief, the staff performed beyond expectations.

Considerable progress was made in our publication activity. Besides the usual editing, refereeing, and publishing, all the journals were receiving extensive worldwide use electronically. A new, totally electronic journal, Physical Review Special Topics - Accelerators and Beams (PRST:AB) has been launched. An online archive for Physical Review and Physical Review Letters (PROLA) became available to the physics community and it was immensely popular. A new activity, namely, Physical Review Focus, was initiated and the response from fellow physicists, as well as from the media, was very positive.

Thanks to the efforts of many, and especially those of our Executive Officer and Treasurer, very good progress was made on planning for the APS Centennial. This activity dominated the activities at APS Headquarters in College Park, MD. During the year, work was completed on the APS Timeline Wall Chart and two new books were produced: a special edition of the Reviews of Modern Physics and a coffee table book for the general public. In addition, many projects were undertaken to build excitement for the Centennial: a special Centennial program, poster, calendar, membership directory, and invitation were mailed to each APS member. The Meetings Department received more than 9000 abstracts for the Meeting, special guests from around the world were invited, corporate funding was sought and obtained (more than $1M), and planning for special educational and international programs was undertaken. In combination with the exhibits that the units are developing, some exhibits that the Society is preparing, the Special Centennial Symposia, and the many technical papers, the Centennial Meeting should be the greatest meeting the Society has ever had. International activities included a unique meeting of 21 physical societies of the western hemisphere. This meeting was initiated by the APS and held in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in November. On-going cooperation between these societies will continue.

The Society continued to be active in educational matters in considerable measure as a result of the funds collected (more than $5M) during the Campaign for Physics.

Lobbying activities by the APS helped win passage of the Frist-Rockefeller bill in the Senate that called for doubling of the federal research budget. In addition, but perhaps closely related, the Federal support of physics in FY99 was very good.

Construction during the year had two components: a much-needed expansion of the Editorial Office in Ridge, NY, was completed, doubling its size, and the APS office suite in downtown Washington had a large conference room added to it.

Society membership rose by more than 1000 to 41,800. And, finally, the fiscal condition of the Society is excellent; during this last year our net assets rose by 12 % from $71.3M to $80.2M.

Andrew Sessler President, 1998

HIGHLIGHTS OF APS OPERATIONS

RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS
For APS research journals, 1998 was another year of exciting developments in electronic publication. Several new services were launched, and existing services were enhanced.

APS created its first purely electronic journal, Physical Review Special Topics - Accelerators and Beams (PRST-AB). Plans for it were announced in January, manuscript submissions were received starting in March, and the first articles were published online in May. The entire journal process is carried on via the World Wide Web, and papers are published online as they are ready (not waiting for a complete issue). PRST-AB is serving as a testbed for a number of developments which will later be expanded to the other journals (expanded file formats for manuscript submission, improved electronic-submission server, electronic copyright transfer, Web referee server, Web author proof server). AT present, the journal is also unique among APS journals in having neither subscription nor author publication charges; for the next several years the journal will be supported by the sponsorship of major accelerator laboratories.

In March, APS also launched a new Web service, Physical Review Focus, devoted to summaries of articles in Physical Review Letters (and, ultimately, other APS journals) for the benefit of nonspecialist readers. From a PR Focus article, a user may easily go to the abstract of the PRL article and, if an institutional or member subscriber, to the article itself. PR Focus has received an enthusiastic reaction, and is both aiding communication among physicists and explaining physics to the interested lay public.

In July, APS released a beta version of PROLA, the Physical Review Online Archive, containing all of Physical Review (including Letters) from 1985 to 1996; it was converted to a subscription offering in January 1999. As with other APS online-journal offerings, tables of contents and abstracts are freely available to all; subscribers have access to and the ability to search full articles.

Physical Review D, which had changed to article-by-article, electronic-publication-first mode in November 1997, introduced in May a unique article identifier, which allows article citations to be given in their final form without waiting for the print issue (up to two months later). In December, significant enhancements were made to reference linking for the articles (in recent volumes of Physical Review A, B, C, E, and Letters), including cross journal links, links to PROLA, and links to articles which cite the article currently being viewed. In September, APS provided a "global mirror" to improve access to our journals by users around the world-actually dedicated "pipes" rather than a true mirror.

SCIENTIFIC MEETINGS
The 1998 March Meeting, held in Los Angeles, was attended by 5,050 physicists from all over the world. The program included 107 invited sessions, 174 focused sessions, and 201 contributed sessions planned by APS units. An expanded exhibit show was held in conjunction with the meeting, which was very well received by both attendees and exhibitors. In addition, e-mail service was made available for the first time in the exhibit hall for meeting attendees, and an electronic message center was introduced. These new services were very well received, and will be included in future meetings.

The 1998 April Meeting, was held in Columbus, Ohio. The three-and-a-half day meeting was attended by 1,200 physicists and included 56 invited sessions, 51 contributed sessions, and 12 focused sessions. A special Nobel Prize session featured talks by the three 1997 Nobel Laureates in physics.

The APS Meetings Department managed the 40th Annual Meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics held in New Orleans. This meeting was the largest DPP meeting ever held, attracting almost 1,500 attendees. In addition, the Four Corners Section in the Southwest held its first meeting in May 1998, and the Gaseous Electronics Conference (GEC), an independent meeting sponsored by the APS for several decades, was formally incorporated into Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics.

Several new technology-based services were introduced in support of APS meetings in 1998, including on-line meeting registration, web-based abstract submission, and a personal program scheduler enabling meeting participants to "shop" the program sessions prior to the meeting and download selected sessions to form a personal meeting schedule. These new features have been enthusiastically received by the APS membership.

MEMBERSHIP OPERATIONS
Membership: The APS Membership enjoyed a year of continued growth in 1998. The official FY 99 count was 41,786, up by over one-thousand from FY 98. Student membership has shown the highest growth with an increase of 9.3%.

Results from the 1997 Survey of non-U.S. Members were analyzed by the Committee on Membership. Approximately 9,100 APS members reside outside the United States; the survey was sent to a random sample of 1,632 of these individuals. The response rate was 57%. Some noteworthy results include: nearly 70% of international members had studied or worked in the U.S., two-thirds of international members read the majority of their physics research literature in APS journals, and non-U.S. resident APS members cite Physics Today as the most important benefit of APS membership.

Joining the list of APS units in 1998 were the Topical Group on Plasma Astrophysics and the Northwest Section. The Northwest Section is the first section which is explicitly international, drawing members from the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, as well as the northwestern region of the United States.

The new Committee on Career and Professional Development, the successor to the Committee on the Applications of Physics, met for the first time in 1998. As its first major project, it established the Career and Professional Development Liaison (CPDL) Program, a network of liaisons in physics departments across the U. S. with an interest in improving career options and training for their graduates. CPDL held its first workshop in conjunction with the 1998 March Meeting.

In 1998, the APS entered into an agreement with GEICO, a leading auto insurer, to provide members with a preferred rate. In addition to the direct benefit for members, GEICO will also make a yearly contribution to enhance APS membership programs.

The Mid-Atlantic Seniors Group, formed in October 1997 and comprised of retired and senior members in the greater Washington, DC area, continues to be active. Current membership for the group is 115. Many of the group's members are interested in assisting APS with Education and Outreach activities and organizing social activities for local seniors.

APS News: The APS News continued to inform the membership of APS activities and bring general issues affecting physics, such as career issues and government affairs, to their attention. Educational Outreach, a January 1998 insert, outlined APS' extensive educational outreach efforts. APS News is now published in full color with photographs, graphics, and a front-page 'Inside' that summarizes the content on the inner pages to make it more interesting and navigable. APS News-online frequently contains longer versions than the printed version and is hyper-linked to auxiliary material for convenience.

Prizes and Awards: A Task Force on APS Prizes and Awards, with Millie Dresselhaus as chair, provided the APS guidance on a number of issues, such as the breadth of topical coverage, award levels of the current set of awards, and criteria to be used for initiating new awards. It concluded that the APS awards program was functioning very well. The Frank Pipkin Award was established in 1998 and the Szilard lectureship Award was fully endowed.

Information Services: The focus of much of the activity of the Information Services Group at College Park was on providing new and enhanced Internet-based member services. A new system for accepting meetings abstracts via the Web was implemented, and given the "acid test" processing abstracts for our Centennial meeting. This provided a more usable interface for submitters, and improved the error rate over traditional e-mail based submissions. We are proud to say that 40% of all Centennial meeting abstracts were submitted through the Web.

Another new Web-based service is the Online Meetings Registration System. This members-only benefit was put through its paces on the date of Early Registration Deadline for the Centennial Meeting, when the system received registrations at the rate of about one per minute. An integral part of the online registration process is our new ability to verify credit cards online in real-time. In addition to these new services, the process for managing invited speaker submissions was completely revamped in preparation for the Centennial.

A Society-wide project was undertaken with Pricewaterhouse Coopers to develop an integrated Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery plan. Another significant effort for the year was progress toward preparing for Year 2000. A detailed plan is being executed, to ensure that our information systems transition smoothly into the next millennium.

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
The International Program for 1998 consisted of several new initiatives as well as ongoing programs: development of an African outreach project including planning workshops in Paris and Washington, DC, culminating in a physics workshop on spectroscopy in Dakar, Senegal; the convening of a consultative meeting on Western Hemisphere physical societies in Cuernavaca, Mexico; consultations with South Asian colleagues concerning plans and actions for promoting closer association with the US physics community and developing a dialogue on cooperative threat reduction; organization and implementation of plans for the IUPAP General Assembly; and continuing development of a journal distribution program for the FSU and other hard-currency poor nations.

From November 2 through November 4, 1998, representatives from twenty-one national and regional physical societies met in Cuernavaca, Mexico, to explore ways of strengthening physics throughout the Western Hemisphere. The meeting focused on how to better promote research and educational exchanges and to examine the role telecommunications can play in fostering such collaborations. Agreement was reached on the distribution of lists of scholars and programs to promote these objectives. In addition, plans were developed to increase Latin American participation in the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). It was agreed that increased representation in IUPAP could be beneficial to the region and the Organization of American States was petitioned to provide funds to support the attendance of delegations and observers from Latin America.

As a result of Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests conducted in May, 1998, APS President Andrew Sessler (now Past-President) and President-Elect Jerome Friedman (current President), contacted the physics communities in South Asia in a long-term effort to promote communication among physicists with a view to enhancing the role of scientists in building confidence among the regional scientific communities and developing extensive consultations on security, safeguards and arms control. As a result, the Third World Academy of Sciences invited Sessler, Friedman and Lerch to its 10th General Meeting which convened in Trieste on December 9-11. This provided the APS officers with an opportunity to consult informally with the Indian and Pakistani delegations, many of whom held senior positions in their respective scientific establishments. As a result of the consultations in Trieste, several actions were taken including the initiation of an expatriate Indian and Pakistani grass-roots movement to address security, the decision to hold a meeting of the executive committee of this ad hoc group during the APS's Centennial Meeting in Atlanta, and the preparation of plans by ICTP for a physics meeting in Sri Lanka to include informal sessions on South Asian security.

PUBLIC AFFAIRS
Legislative initiatives undertaken by the Office of Public Affairs involve the grassroots network, PGNet, which by year's end included 1025 physicists, and direct lobbying on Capitol Hill by APS leaders, members and staff. In the budget arena, the office focused its efforts on Science Appropriations for FY 1999 and Long-Term Science Authorizations. In the policy arena, its efforts were directed to Climate Change, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Ehlers Report -"Unlocking Our Future." The office also continued its efforts to strengthen the inter-society coalition that it helped establish two years ago to address the four-year decline in science budgets. By the close of the 1997 calendar year, the coalition included 110 societies. Partly in response to the unified call for doubling the research budget, the President last February proposed major increases for science and engineering programs in his FY 1999 budget request.

To build support on Capitol Hill and to encourage the White House to hold to its request, the APS and its coalition partners worked closely with Senators Gramm (R-TX), Lieberman (D-CT), Domenici (R-NM) and Bingaman (D-NM), the originators of S. 1305, "The National Research Investment Act of 1998." The bill, which would have authorized doubling civilian research over ten years, eventually drew 35 co-sponsors. APS op-eds and grass roots activities played a crucial role in developing Senate support for the legislation, but the bill stalled because its managers did not occupy any relevant subcommittee leadership positions.

Ultimately, S. 1305 was replaced by a similar bill, S. 2217, "The Federal Research Investment Act" under the management of Senators Frist (R-TN) and Rockefeller (D-WV), the chairman and ranking Democrat on the Science, Technology and Space Subcommittee. The co-sponsors of S. 1305 endorsed the legislation, and the Commerce Committee and the full Senate passed the bill without dissent late in the session. The APS and its coalition partners helped pave the way for favorable action through grassroots alerts and direct Hill contacts. The House calendar precluded consideration of the bill in the closing days of the 105th Congress. The Frist-Rockefeller bill is widely credited with creating a favorable climate for science funding on Capitol Hill, which permitted grassroots efforts to propel the FY 1999 appropriations for science upward by 4.5 to almost 15 percent.

In the policy arena, the APS Office initiated discussions with the American Chemical Society and the American Geophysical Union to map joint strategies on climate change for calendar year 1999. In accordance with Council action on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the APS Office also began to develop approaches to urge Senate ratification, but put its activities on hold until the Administration indicated that it was prepared to make ratification a priority. Finally, the Office of Public Affairs worked closely with Rep. Vern Ehlers (R-MI) and his staff on a number of key issues highlighted in his science policy report, which the House of Representatives adopted late last fall.

PUBLIC INFORMATION ACTIVITIES
A major initiative of the Office of Public Information in 1998 was support for the "What Is Science?" program of POPA. The OPI was responsible for drafting the final statement, and a supporting document, and assisting in its passage by Council. In addition, initial steps were taken to publicize the program, including mention in the New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, Science Magazine and a long interview in a German news magazine, Sueddeutsche Zeitung. It was also the subject of a guest editorial by Robert Park in Columbia University's "21st Century Project: Junk Science and Pseudoscience." A letter to be sent to other scientific societies was drafted, inviting them to participate in discussions of how to deal with the pseudoscience phenomenon.

In December, OPI organized a half-day presentation for a National Academy of Sciences workshop on helium. The Helium Privatization Act of 1996 calls for the government to sell off the national helium reserve. However, an amendment was added to the bill at the urging of the APS, calling for the NAS to report to Congress on the consequences of such a sale for science and technology before the sale can take place. The workshop was held to inform the Committee responsible for that report. A panel of eight distinguished physicists representing a broad spectrum of helium users was assembled with the keynote speaker being Allan Bromley.

WHAT'S NEW was issued 52 times in 1998. In addition to the more that 7,000 direct e-mail weekly subscribers, there were 62,939 visits to What's New through the APS web site. Items appearing in What's New stimulated numerous news stories during the year and led to a number of radio and television interviews. Responding to media inquiries continues to be the largest single OPI activity.

EDUCATION AND OUTREACH
In 1998 the APS Education and Outreach office continued several ongoing programs, as well as engaging in new initiatives.

Teacher-Scientist Alliance, a program funded by the Campaign for Physics, held a number of activities around the country. In January, 51 scientists, engineers, and educators representing communities in 10 states, attended the APS Lead Scientist Institute in Washington, DC.

Over five days, participants learned about current trends in science education reform and how to put this information to work in their communities. In May, school district leadership teams comprising teachers, administrators, and scientists, representing 14 independent school districts or consortia serving hundreds of thousands of students gathered for the APS San Diego Leadership Institute. These teams formulated plans for implementing hands-on science in elementary grades for all students. In addition to these large institutes, a number of one-day workshops were held around the country in nine states.

High School Teachers' Days were held at three APS divisional meetings: Division of Plasma Physics, Division of Fluid Dynamics, and Division of Nuclear Physics, as well as during the March and April meetings. The Teachers' Day is a one-day workshop for area physics teachers that allows them to get a sense of the exciting science being presented at the meeting. Other ongoing programs are the APS Minority Corporate Scholarships for students who major in Physics, and the site visit programs run by the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics and the Committee on Minorities. Both committees made site visits in 1998.

Two new initiatives were undertaken in 1998. The first was APS involvement in the adoption of science standards in California. The leadership of the APS, along with representatives of a number of other scientific societies, called on California to revise the draft standards, and to permit more input from the scientific community. Unfortunately, this did not occur. The second initiative was an APS collaboration with AAPT to host a conference in November entitled "Physics Revitalization Conference: Building Undergraduate Physics Programs for the 21st Century." More than 250 physicists, organized into teams from physics departments across America, gathered in Arlington, Virginia for a weekend of dialogue about the status and possible futures of the American undergraduate physics enterprise. This group represented more than 100 colleges and universities of all types and from all geographical regions and account for about one-fifth of the undergraduate students taking a physics course in America.

CENTENNIAL PLANNING
Planning for the APS Centennial dominated the activities at APS Headquarters in College Park, MD, where almost all staff were involved in some way. During the year, work was completed on the APS Time-Line Wall Chart which will be distributed to schools and universities across the country. Two new books were produced as part of the APS Centennial Celebration: a special edition of the Reviews of Modern Physics entitled "More Things in Heaven and Earth", and a coffee table book for the general public entitled "Physics in the 20th Century". In addition, many projects were undertaken to build excitement for the Centennial. These included the compilation of a list of 250 physicists, chosen by their peers as Centennial Speakers, which was circulated to physics departments nationwide in a special booklet.

APS units proposed more than 50 special, broad-based symposia for the Centennial Meeting and 34 were selected as Centennial Symposia. A special Centennial program, poster, calendar, membership directory and invitation were mailed to each APS member. While the Meetings Department received more than 9000 abstracts and volunteers sorted these into more than 800 sessions, special guests from around the world were invited, corporate funding was sought, and planning for special educational and international programs was undertaken. Special exhibits on the history of APS, on specialized fields of physics, on contributions of women and minorities in physics, and on 100 years of Nobel Laureates were designed and construction was begun.

DEVELOPMENT EFFORTS
On the heels of the $5 million Campaign for Physics which celebrated its victory in November 1997, this year brought with it intense fund raising efforts to benefit programs of the 1999 APS Centennial. By the end of 1998, approximately $1 million had been raised for a variety of key Centennial projects including:

• $300,000 from Lucent Technologies - Bell Labs to fund the printing of "A Century of Physics" timeline wall chart to be distributed free of charge to all high schools, colleges and universities, government and industrial labs, science museums and libraries in the nation.
  
  
• $150,000 each from the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to fund the distribution of "A Century of Physics" timeline wall chart.
  
  
• $75,000 from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation to fund the development of a teacher's guide for "A Century of Physics" timeline wall chart.
  
  
• $70,000 from UPS to fund the packaging of "A Century of Physics" timeline wallchart.
  
  
• $125,000 cash and in-kind support from IBM Corporation to develop "A Century of Physics" website.
  
  
• $40,000 from The Coca-Cola Company to fund a Nobel luncheon program attended by 40+ Nobel laureates and outstanding physics teachers and students.
  
  
• $47,000 from key APS vendors in support of the Fernbank Gala.
  
  
• Travel for select Centennial guests from Delta Air Lines.

In addition to Centennial fund raising, which will continue in 1999 for select legacy projects, the Society's development efforts include involvement in the annual member campaign, prizes and awards fund raising, promoting planned giving opportunities and continuing to broaden the scope of the Development Office operation.

FINANCES for FISCAL YEAR
JULY 1,1997 - JUNE 30, 1998
At the end of fiscal year 1998, the total assets of the American Physical Society had grown to a record $80.2M, up from $71.3M a year before [See Statements of Financial Position below]. Of this amount, $17.8M were balanced by liabilities; the remainder, $62.4M, are the Net Assets of the Society.

The Net Assets include; (temporarily) restricted assets - the monies intended for prizes and awards and for programs of the Campaign for Physics and unrestricted assets - funds that may be used for any of the operations of the Society. This latter quantity constitutes our Reserve fund.

The growth in Net Assets was due to another favorable performance of our investment portfolio. In FY98, for the first time in recent years, a portion of the return from investments was used to cover operating expenses. This policy of using the return from investments, beyond that necessary to grow our Reserve with inflation, for support of Society programs will be incorporated into the budget for FY99 and beyond. In addition, Reserve Funds will be used in FY99 for expenses associated with the Centennial year celebration. During FY98 construction was begun on a desperately needed doubling of the size of the publishing facility at Ridge, NY. Occupancy took place at the end of the calendar year. A similar expansion of our much smaller Washington office was also completed in 1998. The office now has conference facilities which will seat up to 26.

In the future we must anticipate a moderation of the recent high returns on investment funds. Furthermore, the Society is pricing its journals to cover expenses, including the extensive expenses associated with providing a first rank electronic journal product, with minimal excess revenue. The expenses for other Society programs, including Education, Public Affairs, and Outreach, are being covered by the available return from the Reserves, after growth for inflation. This provides a substantial, but limited, amount of resources for the many activities which members wish the Society to perform. Continued discipline and efficiency in all operations of the Society are the key to being able to continue the high level of public responsibility and service which has been the hallmark of the APS in recent years. We are confident that we will be able to perform this service within the constraints of disciplined financial responsibility.