Fifty years of Physics of Fluids Free

The journal Physics of Fluids can trace its history to a recommendation made to the American Institute of Physics (AIP) in 1957 by a Committee to Study Publishing Problems in Physics.

That five-member committee, chaired by Edward U. Condon and including François N. Frenkiel among its members, had been formed to look into some perceived problems with the existing journals in the AIP program but also to see if there was merit in starting new ones. At that time, AIP was providing publishing services for its Member Societies and publishing three journals on its own account (Review of Scientific Instruments, The Journal of Chemical Physics, and Journal of Applied Physics, all begun in the 1930s). The committee began deliberations in the fall of 1956, and by January 1957 was ready with a formal proposal, expressed in a motion as follows:

It is clear that Frenkiel was the driving force behind this proposal, and he had been active during the interval between the inception of the Condon committee and its January meeting, circulating a questionnaire “to selected individuals with particular interests in the journal.”

An Editorial Policy Advisory Board was recommended, with a membership to consist of the editor, the chairman of the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society (APS), two additional members chosen by the Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD), and two members selected by the AIP. Note the close involvement of the APS, through the DFD, with this project; that association continues to this day.

The title of the proposed new journal was a matter of some debate. “Journal of Fluid Physics” was suggested but “was met with general disfavor,” according to the minutes. “Physics of Fluids,” “The Journal of the Physics of Fluids,” and variants of these were judged more acceptable, but none were specifically recommended.

Anyone who has been involved in the launching of new journals in more recent times will be surprised at the speed with which Physics of Fluids was to be started. At that January 1957 meeting it was suggested that a Table of Contents (with titles and authors) of the first issue could be drafted in time for the March 1957 meeting of the AIP Governing Board, so that if the project was approved, the first issue could be dated January 1958 and distributed before the end of 1957.

The motion of the Condon committee was duly presented to the AIP Executive Committee in February 1957. There it met with a favorable reception, and the proposal was forwarded to the Governing Board for final approval. The Executive Committee considered the financial structure of the new journal, and heard from the AIP Secretary (Wallace Waterfall) his opinion that some initial financial assistance could be obtained from certain Government agencies.

The Governing Board met in March 1957, considered the Executive Committee’s recommendation, and passed their own motion:

(It may be of interest to note here that the Governing Board, at the same meeting, discussed a proposal to start another new journal in the field of mathematical physics. AIP’s Journal of Mathematical Physics began publication in 1960 and will celebrate its own half-century in a few years’ time.)

Frenkiel (Fig. 1) had been so closely involved with the planning for the journal that it was to no one’s surprise that he was appointed the first editor, a position he held for the next 24 years. At the time he was working at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University, and that was where he set up the new editorial office. His first Editorial Board was:

Despite the enthusiasm with which the first issue was planned to be mailed before the end of 1957, a couple of difficulties had to be surmounted first. Financial support, originally anticipated from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), was not immediately forthcoming, but after some delay and a contribution to the AFOSR from the Office of Naval Research, enough support was promised to enable the journal to go ahead. Then difficulties were experienced when a printer was sought; most of the printers able to handle the technical difficulties in AIP’s journal texts were overloaded already and could not take on more such work. It was 14 December before the AIP Secretary was able to report to the Executive Committee that William Byrd Press had agreed to take on Physics of Fluids, and the first issue would appear “about the end of January.”

During at least the first year the journal was to appear every two months, with the expectation that monthly publication would be possible when the flow of incoming manuscripts warranted it. The 1958 subscription prices were set at $8.00 for AIP Member Society members, $10.00 for libraries, institutions, and other nonmembers, with a per-page publication charge of $25.00.

The January–February 1958 inaugural issue of Physics of Fluids contained seven articles (Fig. 2). In addition, to emphasize the involvement of both AIP and APS in the planning of the new journal, the issue started with an introduction¹ written jointly by Frederick Seitz, the Chairman of the AIP Governing Board, and H. D. Smyth, President of the APS. Following that introduction was a Scope Statement² signed rather coyly “F. N. F.,” a transparent pseudonym for Frenkiel himself. The scope detailed in this “statement” essentially repeated the coverage listed in the January 1957 motion of the AIP committee.

Seitz, the AIP Governing Board Chair, had himself contributed an article to the journal: “On the theory of the bubble chamber,”³ in which he suggested that the bubbles were nucleated by free electrons produced by the incoming energetic particles through Coulomb processes. Two articles discussed aspects of shock waves;^4,5 Stanley Corrsin had another on isotropic turbulence,⁶ and Frank N. Edmonds, Jr.’s article had the title—intriguing in light of what was to come in work towards practical fusion machines—“Hydromagnetic stability of a conducting fluid in a circular magnetic field.”⁷ 

In the early volumes, the papers tended to focus on subjects typically favored by those few physicists who were active in fluid mechanics, such as rarefied gas dynamics and compressible flows, and less so on low Reynolds number flows, turbulence, boundary layers, convection, and so on that were studied mostly by engineers. There were, of course, no papers on such currently fashionable topics as computational fluid mechanics, microfluidics, nanoflows, chaos, and others that did not exist at that time.

Under Frenkiel’s guidance the new journal prospered and grew, both in number of papers published and in number of subscribers. Bimonthly publication continued only through 1960, with issues appearing monthly from 1961 onwards. The first year’s issues contained 82 articles on 548 pages; by 1962 the number had grown to 295 articles (on 1666 pages), and it rose to 483 articles (3068 pages) in 1970.

Emphasis on plasma physics, particularly plasma containment, became quite obvious. Already in issue 5 (September–October) of the first volume (1958) there were five articles on the stellarator^8–12 out of a total of eleven in the issue. This trend continued, with tokamaks eventually replacing stellarators as the devices of interest.

Frenkiel left Johns Hopkins and by 1960 had relocated to the David W. Taylor Model Basin in Maryland. There he set up the journal office in a small trailer parked behind the laboratory building, where he and his assistant, the formidable Betty Grisamore, handled the editorial chores.

But in 1980 the number of articles published fell to 389, with a sizable number in the limbo of the editor’s desk, awaiting his decisions. Following some perceived unrest in the fluids and plasmas communities, AIP set up an ad hoc Review Committee, chaired by Fred L. Ribe of the University of Washington in Seattle, to investigate any problems with the journal. That committee reported that this journal really needed two editors to cover the diverse interests of the contributors.

Frenkiel was a true gentleman in the old European tradition and a delightful conversationalist. He was Polish by birth but educated in France, where he had great difficulties in World War II, surviving the holocaust himself but losing his wife and child. By 1980 he was becoming infirm and, after the report of the Ribe committee, announced his intention to retire from the journal he had founded more than 20 years earlier. (He died in July 1986.) AIP, following the committee’s recommendation, looked for two editors to replace him—one for the fluid-dynamics part of the editorial content, one for plasmas.

In 1982 Ribe himself, the Chair of the Review Committee, assumed the role of editor for the plasma-physics component of the journal (Fig. 3). At the same time, Andreas Acrivos (Fig. 4), then at Stanford, took on the fluid-dynamics papers. To begin with, the main editorial office was set up in Seattle under Ribe’s direction, and Acrivos forwarded his accepted papers to Seattle to be integrated with the plasma papers and sent to AIP for publication.

With an immediate improvement in editorial-review times, and the resulting reduction in publication delays, the number of fluids papers—which had become only about a fifth of the total papers in the journal—increased to something like half of all the papers, and their quality improved. The journal’s visibility was further aided by the publication in 1985 of a small stand-alone booklet called “Gallery of Fluid Motion.”¹³ Containing images from work in fluid-dynamics research that were originally displayed in an exhibit at the annual meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics, the print project had been planned as an adjunct to AIP’s marketing materials. Soon it became popular in its own right when issued annually. (Now, the entire archive of Gallery of Fluid Motion can be accessed online at http://pof.aip.org/pof/gallery, and some of the contributions can be viewed there as videos.)

In 1988 Acrivos moved to City College of the City University of New York, and organized his editorial office there. By 1989 the fluids papers had become sufficiently numerous that AIP split the journal into Physics of Fluids A (for papers in fluid dynamics) and Physics of Fluids B (for plasma papers) with Acrivos and Ribe each solely responsible for their own part. Volume numbering began with volume 1 in 1989 for each of these parts.

Ribe retired from his position as editor of Physics of Fluids B in 1990, and Ronald C. Davidson took over that journal, with an office at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

Two years later a new Review Committee for Physics of Fluids A was set up under the chairmanship of Mark Nelkin. The Committee’s report found very little to complain about and in fact compared the journal very favorably with Journal of Fluid Mechanics (JFM), edited at the University of Cambridge and long regarded as the leading journal in the field. Nelkin’s committee pointed out how unusual it was for a fluid-dynamics journal to be associated with physics; JFM is based in an applied-mathematics department, and many of the authors in both journals work in various engineering fields (i.e., aeronautical, chemical, mechanical, civil, and marine), plus planetary astronomy, meteorology, and so on.

By 1993, with the two parts of Physics of Fluids operating entirely independently, plans were in place to retitle them as separate journals. But after a request from AIP Marketing for more time to explain the move to the institutional subscribers (mainly college and university libraries), who are never happy with title changes, the move was put off until 1994. At that time Physics of Fluids B became Physics of Plasmas, and Physics of Fluids A reverted to the original Physics of Fluids. The plasma journal, with its brand-new title, started of course with Volume 1; but Physics of Fluids had already published a Volume 1 back in 1958, so it simply continued the sequence begun with Physics of Fluids A in 1989, so that the 1994 issues were called Volume 6. There was of course also a Volume 6 published in 1963, to the consternation of some librarians.

Acrivos announced his own retirement from the journal in 1997, and he was replaced by the two current editors, John Kim of the University of California, Los Angeles and L. Gary Leal of the University of California, Santa Barbara, in whose capable hands the journal continues to grow in stature and timeliness.

Under Kim and Leal the average time between a paper’s submission and its acceptance has dropped from $40weeks$ early in their tenure to about $22weeks$ in 2006, and this improvement took place during a period of strong growth in the number of submissions—from 616 in 2000 to 1059 in 2006. These submissions now come from all over the world, with France and the U.K. in second and third place after the U.S., followed by the other industrialized countries of western Europe, Japan, India, China, Canada, and so on. Those countries grouped together as “other” (with eleven or fewer manuscripts received in 2006) together provided 11% of the total in that year, implying an awareness of the journal over a wide geographical range.

While the number of submissions has increased significantly, the acceptance rate over this period has tightened. The rate was over 60% before 1998, and about 50% in 2006. The average length of each paper has remained remarkably constant at about ten published pages.

The strong relationship between AIP’s Physics of Fluids and the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics that was so important during the journal’s formative years continues, with the publication of the Fluid Dynamics Prize paper whenever possible and the continuing inclusion of papers from the Division’s display known as the Gallery of Fluid Motion.

As part of the AIP Journal Publishing Program, Physics of Fluids has embraced the developments made possible by modern technology, such as online distribution, article-at-a-time publication, color and multimedia availability in the online versions, web-based manuscript submission, and a digitized archive going back to that original edition of 1958.

The author thanks Andreas Acrivos for his encouragement towards the preparation of this history, and for the many valuable comments and corrections he made on earlier drafts. Helpful comments on an early version of this paper were received from three past Executive Directors of AIP, H. William Koch, Kenneth W. Ford, and Marc H. Brodsky. Thanks are also due to the following members of the AIP staff for providing copies of original documents on which some of this history is based and for confirming the time sequence of some of the more recent events: Doreene Berger, Martha Pagliuca, Melissa Poleski, Jennifer Sullivan, and Margaret Wiley.