I would first like to acknowledge the efforts of several people who helped significantly in organizing this meeting. I especially thank Jessica Binder, Secretary of the Theoretical High Energy Physics Group at Los Alamos, and Kathleen DeGregorio from Journal Information Systems (JIS) of APS for their indespensible assistance in handling the complicated logistics demanded of this meeting. From The American Physical Society we have the three operating officers, the Executive Officer Judy Franz, the Treasurer Harry Lustig and myself, as well as Maria Lebron, our Associate Publisher, and of course Bob Kelly, Director of JIS. Most of the senior editors are here: Bernd Craseman, of Physical Review A, Peter D. Adams, PRB, Sam Austin, PRC, Lowell Brown and Dennis Nordstrom, PRD, Brand Johnson, PRE as well as PRL and PRA, and Jack Sandweiss and Gene Wells, PRL. I'm sure you've seen their names many times, although you may not have met them before. John Light is here from the Journal of Chemical Physics, our sister journal from the American Institute of Physics. The organizing committee and program committee of this workshop consisted of myself, Pat Kreitz (SLAC), John Clem (Iowa State U), Bob Kelly and Paul Ginsparg. I also note the presence of representatives from several other societies. From the German Physical Society, DPG, Eberhard Hilf and Burkhard Fricke, from the UK Institute of Physics, Alan Singleton and Tony Pearce, as well as Peter Boyce (American Astronomical Society), and Bill Hagen (IEEE).
The journals ofThe American Physical Society have many problems, but most of these are problems of success rather than anything else. The challenges of the electronic revolution are what we are dealing with today, but the greatest immediate problem we are faced with is the inexorable growth that our journals have experienced in recent years. Growth statistics are quite spectacular, and we see no signs of this phenomenon leveling off -- the doubling time of the total volume of material submitted to them is about eight years.This is a source of considerable pride to us, but is also something to be very concerned about. For example, we are all too well aware of the difficulties libraries are experiencing because of this volume, and the accompanying cost in dollars, space, and information retrieval.
One of our speakers today, Maurice Rice, is actually on a task force, chaired by Eugen Merzbacher, which is right now addressing the growth phenomenon in an attempt to understand it and possibly to control it. Obviously this is intimately tied to the general matter of electronic publishing, of which eprint archiving is an important part. Here we are mainly concerned with this latter issue, although I am confident that some broader aspects of electronic publishing will surface as the meeting develops. E-prints can be thought of as representing the "front end" of the publishing process, but it is inevitable that e-prints are linked closely with the "back-end", i.e., the refereed and published final articles. Some will doubtless argue that eprints can themselves serve as both ends, although we at APS do not take this drastic view.
Now I would like to turn the meeting over to Robert A. Kelly, our peripatetic and enthusiastic standard bearer for electronic publishing.