Electronic Physics Papers

While this may not be entirely a good thing, I'll summarize here some of the key resources you should know about so you can decide where to take advantage.

If you just want links direct to the sites concerned, try the "Catalog of Resources."

I'll divide this into preprints and published journals and also into the writing/submitting and reading/fetching of articles. I'll also address briefly some developments likely to arrive but which are currently just on the horizon.

Since 1991 a set of electronic bulletin boards, based initially at Los Alamos, has grown rapidly to the point where it has now become the principal focus of preprint distribution. The speed of electronic distribution and the high costs of conventional mailing have led many labs to stop sending out hard-copy preprints entirely.

Please be aware that all this information is changing rapidly --- and please feel free to let me know if anything here is out of date or incorrect.

"Publishing" Preprints

Check that your manuscript will TeX correctly before submitting your file to a journal or bulletin board. This best way to do this is on a machine decoupled from your own, say by a friend at another institution. People too often use local macros, etc. without realizing that no one else will be able to read the file.

Click here for a complete list of commands you need to submit your manuscript to LANL.

References: Think Hypertext

More importantly, bear in mind that further automation is coming soon, including the possibility of browsers which can pull up a new paper immediately when they encounter a reference. Two things which certainly won't hurt:

• Include the bulletin board reference, even for published papers, in the precise form which the archives currently search for, e.g., hep-th/9408123.
• Where possible, use a new number for each paper you reference. Then future browsers will be able to have a unique destination for each link in the text. Though they might have pull-down menus or other interfaces, why not make it easy for your readers to navigate?

Retrieving Preprints

The archive at xxx.lanl.gov has chronological index pages for each month for each bulletin board, listing authors and titles received. Most pages, for example the list of hep-th authors/titles for August, 1994 contain links labeled [abs,src,ps] which take you to the paper's abstract, TeX source file, and PostScript version, respectively.

PostScript files, being printable and viewable on screen, are the most useful. However since some of them must be processed by hand at SLAC, they are usually delayed a day or so beyond the TeX files and are not available for all bulletin boards.

TeX files are the form submitted directly by the authors. They often use certain standard macro packages which you have to have on your system to process them. Most of the popular ones are available from the LANL server: if you are reading this on WWW, you can find descriptions and sources on-line.

For a unix script which will recognize and automatically TeX preprints served by LANL, look here

For help with e-mail commands, click here or send mail to xxx.lanl.gov with Subject: help.

Journal Submissions

Be sure to ask about figures. Most journals can receive and process files adhering to common conventions on the bulletin boards, such as handling figures send, via "uufiles," as uuencoded, compressed, tar files. Others may request a fax submission to be sent to referees with originals to follow by regular mail.

(More info needed here....)

Journals On-Line

Not yet. This is a subject of active discussion. You might want to read or participate in the APS E-Print Archive Forum . Nuclear Physics requires that you be a subscriber to browse even their meager experimental on-line data. Elsewhere on the Internet, however, other fields have put their research generals on-line.