Key points The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable was formed in 2009 at the request of a US Congressional Committee to develop recommendations for public access policy. Published in January 2010, the Roundtable's recommendations had a significant impact on the guidelines for federal funding agencies issued in 2013. The Roundtable was unique in bringing together individuals holding divergent views about open access policy. The success of the Roundtable may provide important lessons for policymakers in addressing open access issues.

Key points The success of the CHORUS and DOE relationship is the result of nearly two decades of interactions between the DOE and a group of scientific publishers. The relationship between CHORUS and the US federal agencies required understanding of different motivations, operations, and philosophies. Although achieving public access was simple in principle, it required considerable effort to develop systems that satisfied all parties. Publishers had been working with federal agencies to achieve open access before the 2013 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, but this helped to create a path for a more fruitful relationship.

Harnessing the energy of nuclear fusion remains a formidable and worthwhile challenge. Meeting it requires nurturing international cooperation and reinvigorating US leadership.

Charles B. Duke, a remarkably versatile theoretical physicist, passed away on 28 June 2019 in Webster, New York. Charlie’s contributions to science extended far beyond his work at Xerox Research, where he spent much of his career. A leading solid-state physicist, he did pioneering science in industry, academia, and national laboratories; held many leadership positions; launched and led prestigious scientific journals; was a consummate teacher; and volunteered extensively in service to the scientific community. Charles B. Duke AMERICAN VACUUM SOCIETY, COURTESY AIP ESVA PHYSICS TODAY COLLECTIONPPT|High resolutionBorn on 13 March 1938 in Richmond, Virginia, Charlie obtained his BS from Duke University in 1958, with majors in math and theology. In 1963, under Eugene Wigner at Princeton University, he received his PhD in physics for explaining nuclear-surface-peaked energy absorption in nucleon scattering from nuclei. That same year he became a research scientist at General Electric’s Corporate Research Laboratory, applying his many-body-theory skills to solid-state physics, including the tunneling of electrons across semiconductor diodes.In 1969 Charlie went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he became one of its youngest tenured faculty members. Cementing his scientific reputation, he leveraged the understanding he had gained in his thesis work by creating a way to derive crystalline surface structure parameters from low-energy electron diffraction data. That feat took place in the early days of surface science, when preparing clean, well-characterized surfaces was nontrivial; when computers were unimaginably slow; and when there was much contention over whose ideas came first and whose numbers were most reliable. Still, Duke’s results, with Charlie Tucker, George Laramore, and others, contributed substantially to establishing a database of silicon and other semiconductor surface structures that were key to characterizing the behavior of electronic materials.In 1972 Charlie moved to the Xerox Webster Research Laboratories, rising through research management until his retirement in 2006. His contributions to Xerox included spearheading the electronic devices and materials study that reshaped much of the corporation’s R&D in the 1990s, for which he received Xerox’s highest honor, the President’s Award. Other notable achievements included the color imaging science thrust and the tribology and xerography initiative linking fundamental charge-transfer processes to the core processes that make Xerox machines work.Charlie maintained strong connections to the academic community, as an adjunct professor at the University of Rochester, and by assuming pivotal leadership roles in scientific societies. He served the American Vacuum Society (AVS) as its president in 1979 and on its board, driving the group’s evolution to a concentration on fundamental and applied surface science. Charlie strengthened the reputation of the society’s Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology. He also served on the Materials Research Society Council, strengthening the organization’s publication portfolio by founding the Journal of Materials Research and serving as its first editor-in-chief from 1985 to 1986. For over a decade, beginning in 1992, he was editor of Surface Science and Surface Science Letters, the most prestigious journals in the field.Charlie interrupted his career at Xerox to serve in 1988–89 as deputy director and chief scientist at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. That afforded a close-up view of the national laboratory complex, which he used to broaden his lectures and consultations on research career management.Over his career, Charlie earned much recognition. He is one of few to be inducted into both the National Academy of Engineering (1993) and the National Academy of Sciences (2001). AVS bestowed on him its most prestigious prize, the Medard W. Welch Award, in 1977 for work on electron scattering. The American Physical Society (APS) awarded Charlie the George E. Pake Prize in 2006 for contributions to understanding tunneling in solids and electron-surface scattering and to Xerox Corp. From his retirement until his death, Charlie served as a professor of physics at the University of Rochester, where he continued to pursue broad scientific interests and also returned to studying theology.During Charlie’s long career at Xerox, he promoted the endeavors of early-career scientists and engineers, particularly in industrial research. To that end, from governance positions with the American Institute of Physics (publisher of Physics Today) and APS, Charlie organized task forces and outreach initiatives.With her selfless support and social graces, Ann, Charlie’s wife, was integral to Charlie in sustaining his legendary work ethic.Many of our colleagues count Charlie as an essential mentor, career counselor, and scientific critic. We three benefited immensely from his counseling and incisive critiquing over some three decades. The intensity of his intellect, force of his convictions, and sincerity of his friendship have enabled Charlie’s lifelong lessons to transcend time. In his own words: “You have to find people who are doing similar things, who are going to mix it up and call each other nuts and have some real good wars and so on—get everybody to think, which is … my philosophy of research.”What a colleague! We will sorely miss the next “war.”© 2020 American Institute of Physics.

The recently retired Fermilab archivist and historian discusses her role in piecing together the puzzle that was the ill-fated Superconducting Super Collider project.

Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider, Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson, and Adrienne W. Kolb, U. Chicago Press, 2015. $40.00 (480 pp.). ISBN 978-0-226-29479-7 Buy at Amazon

A passion for hands-on discovery marked the life of MIT physics professor emeritus John Gordon King, an imaginative experimental physicist and transformative physics educator. King is best known for his work with electricity and magnetism and for mentoring hundreds of students throughout his more than half-century career at MIT’s Molecular Beam Laboratory. He died at his summer home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on 15 June 2014.John Gordon KingMASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGYPPT|High resolutionKing was born in London on 13 August 1925 and was educated in France, Switzerland, and the US. After serving in World War II, principally through the US Navy as a radio specialist in Harvard University’s Underwater Sound Laboratory, he went to study at MIT. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1950 and his PhD in 1953, both in physics. King joined the MIT faculty upon graduation and ran the freshman physics lab, which helped shape many of his ideas for inspiring young students. He was named Francis L. Friedman Professor of Physics in 1974 and retired in 1996.As a doctoral student of Jerrold Zacharias, who began MIT’s Molecular Beam Laboratory, King measured the electric and magnetic multipole moments of atomic nuclei. He and Vincent Jaccarino discovered the magnetic octupole moment of iodine-127 in groundbreaking work in which they applied the precise and elegant molecular-beam techniques to the halogens. He also helped develop the atomic clock based on the hyperfine structure of cesium-133, converting a laboratory experiment into a commercial and reliable instrument that has become the universal time standard.In the early 1960s, King became head of the Molecular Beam Laboratory. Committed to the interconnectivity of disciplines, he expanded the scope of the lab’s research to include cosmology, low-temperature physics, and biophysics. During his tenure, more than 100 undergraduate and 25 doctoral students earned degrees in those fields.King is best known for his 1960 measurement of the charge magnitude equality of the electron and the proton and the neutrality of the neutron to 10−20 of an electron charge. That experiment, which still graces the first page of most electricity and magnetism textbooks, had been prompted by a conjecture that the expansion of the universe was due to a slight charge imbalance.Combining cryogenic and molecular-beam techniques, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, King developed a series of experiments to explore the fundamental properties of superfluid helium by observing variations in evaporation and scattering behavior. An interest in pursuing the limits of microscopy led him to conduct theoretical and experimental studies to improve the resolution of electron microscopy to atomic dimensions. King branched into biophysics with his invention of a molecular microscope; for the illuminating projectile, he used water molecules rather than light.King was deeply committed to improving science education at the high school and college levels. In the 1960s he worked with the influential Physical Science Study Committee, for which he produced and acted in eight movies, including Time and Clocks and Interference of Photons. In one film, King demonstrates a principle of physics by driving fast in one of his meticulously restored Bugatti automobiles.Traditional laboratory “cookbook” exercises, King believed, bored students and stifled creativity and ingenuity. To address that, and to help students understand fundamental science concepts in the real world and not just in the classroom, he introduced methods that emphasized hands-on learning and independent thinking. In 1966 he started Project Lab for undergraduates to design their own open-ended research. He advised his students, “The best way to understand your apparatus is to build it.” In a 2009 oral history interview with the American Institute of Physics (http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/33499.html), King remarked, “What people learned in Project Lab was that you could take any number of innocent situations and find complicated and interesting things that could be a life work.” More than 1400 MIT students were a part of Project Lab.King found that studying various disciplines simultaneously was disruptive for most students, so he advocated for full immersion into one topic at a time. He convinced other faculty members to join him in offering a sequenced version of the standard MIT undergraduate curriculum. The model has since been used at many schools in their intersemester immersion courses.Among King’s numerous publications is the upcoming book Physics Project Labs (Oxford University Press, December 2014), which he cowrote with Paul Gluck. His many honors and awards include a 1956 Alfred P. Sloan Award, the Danforth Foundation’s 1971 E. Harris Harbison Award, and the American Association of Physics Teachers’ 1965 Robert A. Millikan Medal and 2000 Oersted Medal, the organization’s most prestigious award.Perhaps his most endearing quality as a physicist, witnessed by his students and many of his colleagues, was King’s unbridled enthusiasm for physics and new ideas. One could discuss a concept with him, and within minutes he would make drawings and estimates on the backs of envelopes and often invent an interesting and viable experiment on the spot. Ideas did not die when talking to King—rather, they flourished.© 2014 American Institute of Physics.