Future internal and external efforts of JPS

Shoji Nagamiya - President, JPS
Sep 1,2010-Aug 31,2011
Director, J-PARC Center

In September of 2010, I was appointed the President of the Physical Society of Japan (hereafter referred to as JPS).  On this occasion I re-read last-year’s article “Being elected to the JPS President-Elect”.  Among the three points I wrote in this article, I discovered two have certain progress.  First, I would like to start describing these two.

The first point is regarding the role of JPS in Asia.  Building up a firm position of JPS in Asia is indeed an important effort.  Nowadays, in both economics and science the three regions, North America, Europe and Asia, are playing dominant roles on many aspects in the world.  However, within Asia, cooperation in physics has not been established at all, except for some specific, limited areas.  All countries behave almost independently.  On the other hand, the European Physical Society and the American Physical Society are playing major roles in coordinating individual countries, in a much more cooperative manner.

I have therefore decided to establish much stronger ties between individual physical societies, in particular, by changing the Asian Physical Society (APS) which has already been established many years ago.  This year, we will select new council members for APS.  On this occasion, the Korean Physical Society, the Chinese Physical Society (both Beijing and Taipei), and the Japanese Society for Applied Physics (hereafter referred to as JSAP), together with our JPS, would be expected to work together to nominate new council members from their physical societies.  Such international collaborations have been missing in the past.  I wonder how many physicists are aware of the fact that the next APS meeting will be held in Shanghai in November.  This is just an example of how the council members of the present APS are disconnected from each individual physical society.  Fortunately, China and Korea have responded very positively to my new proposal.  Once Korea, China and Japan can work together coherently, I feel very positive about initiating a new cooperation among Asian countries in physics.

The second point is the unification of two existing journals written in English, Progress of Theoretical Physics (PTP) and Journal of Physical Society of Japan (JPSJ).  The importance of having an English journal in Japan is clear, and we have already decided to unify these two journals in the spring of 2013.

Based on surveys conducted among JPS members, various opinions on how to unify these two journals have been voiced and studied carefully, taking into account the historical value and outlook to a new future.  An example of the transition being studied today is to have, for example, JPSJ focus on condensed matter physics, while having PTP (or PTEP by including experiments) focus on particle and nuclear physics.

Recent movements towards “open access” of any published article must also be considered.  If one desires to achieve this goal, either authors or major laboratories must cover necessary funds.  On the other hand, another recent opinion is to have free submission fee for any article.  In order to warrant this requirement the journal must obtain necessary funding by selling many books and journals.  These apparently contradicting requests have to be considered carefully when discussing the journal’s future.

In addition to the above two points, one of the main goals this year is to achieve a smooth transition from the present organization to a “nonprofit cooperation”.  In my tenure for President this effort might occupy most of my time.  Already in July of 2010, a major guideline was approved in our society’s meeting.  Also, these major changes have already been published and described in our Japanese journal.  We are now ready to apply these changes in early 2011.  If all goes smoothly, we should officially become a nonprofit cooperation by the spring of 2012.

Furthermore, we recently performed a job rotation for administrative staff members.  This was one of the tasks that I enforced while I was President-Elect.  I feel that such change is very important, and can make the entire administration structure more effective and vital.  We have also decided to have such job rotations once every five years.

The third point in the article that I quoted before is regarding the necessity of advertising physics to society.  We have not achieved significant progress on this point during the past year, but I often think about it.  Physics is the most fundamental science among all natural sciences.  The importance, the fun, and the dream in physics should be communicated and appealed to a much wider audience from JPS to the public, much more frequently than before.  I would like to keep pursuing this goal in the future.

Finally, our relation with JSAP has become stronger.  We have a common publication center location issue, which I would like to proactively resolve in the near future.