Fifty Years of Physical Review C

Physical Review C was established in 1970 as part of the fourth attempt to appropriately subdivide the Physical Review into coherent sections. The hope was to replace a huge centrally managed journal with several (four) journals that could each be managed by an editor with expertise over its subject matter. This approach has been successful. The APS journals, having multiplied and further divided, now dominate physics publications. PRC was, in 1970, just one of the main journals in nuclear physics, but over the next fifty years became the dominant archival journal in the field. It led the move toward having remote editors who were active in research and located at Universities or National Laboratories, established a group of remote Associate Editors and an expert staff at the journal headquarters on Long Island. One can describe the evolution of PRC’s content as MORE: more papers, more non-US, more theory, and more authors. There have been challenges, perhaps principal among them, the move to author prepared manuscripts and on-line publication. I’ll describe, briefly, how it all happened, and say a few words about future directions and challenges as I see them.