APS News

August/September 1998 (Volume 7, Number 8)

Physical Review Online Archive

Covering all of Physical Review from 1985-1996

The Physical Review OnLine Archive (PROLA), covering all of Physical Review from 1985 to 1996, became available and will be free for the remainder of the year. In 1999, PROLA will be available at a modest cost of $300 for institutional subscribers to any of the Physical Review journals or Physical Review Letters, as well as to individual members for $100. Also, subscribers to a single journal who subscribe to PROLA get access to everything in PROLA, not just the particular journal to which they subscribe. An existing protoype system has been in use at Los Alamos National Laboratory (http://www.lanl.gov/external/) and other select pilot sites since late 1996. Although the new server has been completely redesigned, the new PROLA will have nearly 100,000 articles.

According to APS Editor-in-Chief Martin Blume, work is progressing on carrying the archive further back in time, with the expectation that PROLA will become the repository for all new journal issues, such that a library subscriber will have access to prior year volumes through PROLA. "We have the capability to go back as far as 1975 without much travail," said Blume. "Ultimately we would like to go back to 1893, including the entire contents of the journal since its inception in the online archive."

The availability of an online archive offers to dramatically improve the usability of previously published material by creating a powerful new research tool for both the science historian and the working physicist. Specifically, PROLA gives users the ability to navigate quickly from a table of contents, or a search result, to a good screen viewable image version of each article. Other features include the ability to print high-quality versions of the article at the user's desktop; and planned hypertext links to articles containing references to, or that are referenced by, the current document, as well as any errata referring to the current document.

PROLA will be a very valuable asset for the scientific community. Greatly enhanced access to earlier issues of Physical Review together with useful search and linking capabilities will be brought to the scientist's desktop," said Blume of this most recent APS online effort, "We believe that this wide desktop availability of early issues of Physical Review will change the way reference materials are used."

PROLA may be accessed through the APS Homepage, under the Reseach Journal button, or directly at: prola.aps.org.

©1995 - 2024, AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY
APS encourages the redistribution of the materials included in this newspaper provided that attribution to the source is noted and the materials are not truncated or changed.

Editor: Barrett H. Ripin

August/September 1998 (Volume 7, Number 8)

APS News Home

Issue Table of Contents

APS News Archives

Contact APS News Editor


Articles in this Issue
Physical Review Online Archive
APS Views
Plenary Speakers Selected for APS Centennial
Letters to the Editor
Inside the Beltway
The Back Page
1998 Fall Meeting Madness
APS Congressional Fellowship Awarded
APS Sponsors Mass Media Fellows
Coulomb Interactions, "Transistor-less Computing" Highlight 1998 DAMOP Meeting
A Century of Physics
100 Years: The International Dimension
Zero Gravity
DAMOP Thesis Award
Outstanding Undergraduate AMO Researchers
Commission on Women in Science
APS Statement on Federal R&D Presented to Senate Committee
APS Task Force Suggests "Physics Today" Changes
Acrivos Dissertation Award Established