APS announces new online public access initiative for US high schools

The American Physical Society (APS) announces a new public access initiative that will give high school students and teachers in the United States full use of all online APS journals, from the most recent articles back to the first issue in 1893, a collection including over 400,000 scientific research papers. APS will provide access to its journals, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review, and Reviews of Modern Physics, at no cost, as a contribution to public engagement with the ongoing development of scientific understanding.

The high school program is a natural follow on to last summer's offering to U.S. public libraries. "When we made our journals freely available to public libraries, we were happily surprised to receive requests for access from high schools as well," said APS Publisher Joseph Serene. "We are now delighted to share our journals and their archive with interested secondary school students and teachers."

"We want to foster the interest of high school students in the primary scientific literature. Some of it will be beyond their reach, but there are also papers such as the invention of the transistor and laser diode that can pique the interest of many high school students." said Gene Sprouse, APS Editor in Chief.

High school teachers or librarians can obtain access by accepting a simple online site license and providing valid IP addresses of public-use computers in their high school or high school library https://librarians.aps.org/account/public_access_new.

The license requires that users be in the high school when they read the APS journals online or download articles. Initially the program is limited to the U.S., but it may be extended to high schools in other countries in the future.

"We've been excited to obtain access to the online APS journals, since we heard about the program for public libraries," said Becca Ferrick, head librarian at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, VA. "Our students and faculty look forward to using these valuable resources to support our science curriculum and student research."

Source: American Physical Society