Weinberg is New PRD Editor

Erick Weinberg, a professor of physics at Columbia University, became editor of Physical Review D (PRD) as of June 1, 1996. He succeeds Lowell Brown (University of Washington), whose term expired at the end of 1995. Weinberg received his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University in 1973 and spent two years as a member of the Institute of Advanced Study before joining the faculty of Columbia University, where he has remained ever since. A former Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, he has served on the editorial board of both PRD and Physical Review Letters and on the APS Task Force on Journal Growth, as well as in various administrative capacities for the Aspen Center for Physics.

Weinberg believes the primary task of the editor is to maintain PRD's standing as one of the leading journals in its field, by ensuring that the articles are of the highest quality. The editor should also be involved in the decision-making process of the APS journal-related issues. The greatest challenge of the future will be electronic publishing, according to Weinberg, although any steps toward an electronic version of PRD are at this point viewed as experimental. "We are not yet at the point where it makes sense to fix long-term standards, or even to decide precisely how we want to exploit computer technology to add capabilities that are not possible with a paper journal," he said, adding that the Los Alamos preprint server project has raised expectations, and thus a short-term goal would be to have PRD available online in a form comparable to the Los Alamos project. This will happen in the near future.