'Key issues' articles in Reports on Progress in Physics

The journal Reports on Progress in Physics has announced the start of a series of shorter articles that will allow some of the leading figures in various fields of physics to make highly advanced and "speculative" insights into the particular area of their expertise. The following is the announcement from the journal's editorial board:

The Editorial Board of Reports on Progress in Physics has commissioned a series of short articles from world leaders on key physics issues in their field. These essays may raise the key issues, or ask open questions or may even suggest wild ideas. Basically, they give world leading physicists the opportunity to write what they think about the key issues in their field, free from the usual requirement to provide the fair and balanced presentations of the subject normally found in articles in Reports on Progress in Physics. We believe that the readers of the journal will be interested to learn about these exciting ideas.

Just as Hilbert's famous paper of 1900 set the agenda for the next century or more in mathematics, so we hope that this series of papers will define the key issues and open questions in physics for the 21st Century and that the articles will be widely cited and downloaded.

The first of these articles—'Insights from simulations of star formation' by Richard B Larson (Yale University, USA)—is published in the current issue. We trust that readers will find this article and its successors in the series to appear through 2007 and beyond entertaining and stimulating.

It used to be that journals published by the Institute of Physics (IoP) could be read for free during the first 30 days that it appears online. I do not know if this is still the case, but it is worth checking. Furthermore, other journals published by the IoP such as the New Journal of Physics are open access journals. They are always available for free.

Zz.