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."