Physicists thrive with paperless publishing Publish or perish.
That's the credo by which scientists live. At least as far as publishing is concerned, no one is perishing. Instead of the old method of writing to a researcher to get a reprint of his or her journal article, HEP scientists are using the World Wide Web to access e-prints preprint articles that let physicists share results faster than they could through the journals in which they ultimately publish. Back in the 1960s, SLAC librarians started collecting submitted preprints, and each week they would create a list of all of them, which they would mail around the world. Subscribers could then write to authors of the papers that interested them and request reprints.