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FOR the first time in a long while I have plenty of empty shelves in my office. I have just thrown out all the scientific journals that I’ve collected over the past 30 years. A little rash of me? Not at all. They had long passed their usefulness.

For a start, back numbers are available on the Web. More importantly, I don’t read new journals as much as I used to. This is not because I am less eager to learn their contents. Rather, most of what’s in them has already been published electronically, in particular on the famous physics…

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