Scientific Exchange of Information

Exchange of information between scientists is crucial to the development of science, and yet there is a tension between making that information freely available, sharing it with colleagues and so forth, and the rigid and archaic system of copyrights that journals operate under. So it was gratifying to read a short essay on the history of Phys Rev Lett by a former editor that contained an explicit recognition of this tension:

"With the Xerox, ubiquitous after 1965, the production of high-quality copies of a paper was trivial and the dissemination of preprints expanded greatly. We Physical Review Letters editors understood that we neither could, nor should, attempt to interfere with this kind of prepublication information transfer."

The highly symmetric Boron-80

The colloquium speaker yesterday mentioned a theoretical prediction of the existence of a stable 'buckyball' made from Boron atoms. It's like the structure of the famous Buckminsterfullerene C60 except that an additional atom is placed at the centre of every hexagon. It was publicised last year, and the paper with ab initio calculation was published in Phys Rev Lett. 

Is the symmetry really icosahedral? There's a question mark since some other scientists have released a preprint on ArXiv that suggests a structure with tetrahedral symmetry might be more stable (some of the atoms at the centre of the hexagons are pushed in, others are pushed out). We'll know for sure if this paper passes the peer review process.