Editorial

Published: 2024-05-31
https://doi.org/10.20935/AcadQuant6261

Academia Quantum: advances and innovation in

quantum science and technology
Steven K. Lamoreaux1,∗

Citation: Lamoreaux SK. Academia Quantum: advances and innovation in quantum science and technology. Academia Quantum
2024;1. https://doi.org/10.20935/AcadQuant6261

1. Introduction
Academia Quantum has been launched to enhance the sharing
of theoretical and experimental concepts and techniques in the
burgeoning quantum science and technology fields. Initially, this
journal will be divided into five sections as follows: Quantum
Physics and Optics; Metrology, Sensing, and Instrumentation;
Quantum Communications and Cryptography; Quantum Com-
puting and Simulation; and Quantum Materials and Devices. The
sections will be expanded, divided, and added to in the future as
the journal community grows and evolves to reflect the multi- and
interdisciplinary nature of our field. Our goal is to publish peer-
reviewed papers that advance knowledge in these sub-fields, as
well as document the development of our understanding of funda-
mental principles and applications. Academia Quantum provides
(i) expert peer review processes that will ensure continued trust in
the journal, (ii) rapid publication based on fast turnaround times,
and (iii) broad dissemination to, and serve the needs of, the truly
global millions of Academia.edu members, in addition to serving
the needs of the worldwide scientific and technical communities
irrespective of Academia.edu membership (which is encouraged,
and it’s free).
There are challenges in the public sharing of knowledge and
information through scientific publication. A principal one is
establishing continued trust that the knowledge and information
presented in a publication are reliable and conform to ethical stan-
dards. The worldwide sharing of scientific knowledge and expert
opinions and the accessibility of vast amounts of data and facts
have been enabled in new and revolutionary ways thanks to the
internet, but in a largely unfiltered manner. Academia Quantum
uses peer review and expert assessments by Academia.edu mem-
bers as the foundation of the trust in the content that we publish.
The technical analysis and editorial assessment of a paper, which
includes reviewing overall concepts, methodology, data presenta-
tion, and/or experimental interpretations, ideally is done in part-
nership with the author(s). We expect that authors will adhere
to responsible conduct in research and recognize their own duty
and self-responsibility to judge the scope and quality of their own
work relative to contemporary studies, and to cite original work
properly. This is an author-centric philosophy to which Academia
Quantum will aspire. Of course, our Academia.edu reviewers can
validate interpretations and, via feedback to authors, can enhance
the quality and potential significance of a paper, while allowing
authors to present their work as intended without numerous ar-
bitrary and time-consuming revisions.
Another principal challenge is the speed of academic pub-
lishing. Over the last 20 years, the time required for the
publication of peer-reviewed papers has been considerably
reduced by the transition to electronic publishing, and by
communications through email. However, several delay-
ing steps in publishing remain, including the time required
to identify suitable and willing reviewers, evaluate papers,
and formulate well-reasoned editorial decisions. Academia
Quantum and other Academia journals provide accelerated
manuscript processing by the use of enhanced editorial al-
gorithms and workflow controls. Our goal is to reach rapid
decisions that permit authors to present their work largely as
intended, possibly augmented by reviewer and editor feedback.
A paper’s ultimate merit and value can only be truly estab-
lished through community scientific discussions and its future
references.
Like all worthwhile things in life, there is great competition in
the sciences: for funding, positions, students, ideas, ascendancy
in a sub-field, and even publication. The last thing a serious sci-
entist needs is competition with journal editors and referees. It
is often said that there are “too many papers” being submit-
ted and published. To those who hold this view, the future is
bleak, for as the world continues to develop economically and
educationally, these numbers are only going to increase. The
Academia.edu model of publishing does not recognize limits in the
number of papers and has unlimited distribution via its founda-
tion on the open source model. As an aside, the putative “too many
papers” problem is difficult to understand. The famous ArXiv
preprint server has over 2.4 million papers, and allowing a gen-
erous 10 MB storage per paper requires roughly 24 TB to con-
tain the entire ArXiv. Today, this is a trivial amount of physical
storage, so equipment (digital memory size, library shelf space,
printing press capacities, etc.) is no longer a limitation to pub-
lication volume. The ArXiv has been transformative to science
and technology, as it allows for the rapid dissemination of new
results and is easily searchable. The presence of paper on the
ArXiv brings it greater visibility than if it is published in a jour-
nal accessible only through a paid subscription. One drawback
is that papers on the ArXiv are initially only lightly filtered, as

1
Department of Physics, Yale University, New Haven, P.O. Box 208120, CT 06520-8120, USA.
∗
email: steve.lamoreaux@yale.edu

ACADEMIA QUANTUM 2024, 1 1 of 3

https://www.academia.edu/journals/academia-quantum/about
a serious peer review is outside its purview. Academia.edu has
brought peer review into the model of rapid publication.
Acadamia.edu currently holds, in total, over 55 million papers.
There is a saying, “Several months in the laboratory will save sev-
eral hours in the library” [1]. With search engines, several hours
is now several minutes, even with the vastly increased amount of
information that must be filtered. Even with a cornucopia of pa-
pers, it is still possible to quickly find the ones of specific inter-
est. In the early days of the internet, there was a prediction that
by the year 2000, with the number of bogus meta-tag descriptors
and keywords doubling monthly, no search engine results would
be meaningful [1]. Of course, that did not come to pass, and with
AI-enhanced searching, if it continues to prove feasible and stable,
we can be hopeful that soon we will be able to directly find exactly
what we need, and minutes will become seconds. The perception
of “too many papers” is thereby outdated.
A cornerstone of the scientific method is the verification of pre-
vious results. Historically, papers describing verification studies
were readily published, while nowadays such work is viewed as
derivative and lacking in novelty. In fact, all work is derivative, so
labeling a paper as such is a judgment call. Papers that offer in-
cremental steps in the development of the state of the art can be
extraordinarily valuable and Academia Quantum recognizes this.
My own vision of Academia Quantum is that it is a welcoming
and inclusive publication and discussion venue. Peer review will
ensure that the papers published here are viewed as valid, and
of sufficient quality to build tenure cases, and for grant applica-
tions and in the reporting of the resulting products. In the end,
the true value of the paper is based on the community response
and through citations of the paper.
My hope is that the refereeing process of Academia Quantum
will be positive for the author, the reader, and the field. We all
have stories; my own 1997 paper on the Casimir force was ini-
tially rejected for being derivative, but the referee requested a
better drawing because they’d like to discuss the results in a talk.
Needless to say, after pointing out that such a drawing would be
otherwise unavailable, my paper was published and immediately
started an entirely new field of precision measurements of this
and related effects, and has been cited more than 2,500 times.
Time was wasted dealing with refereeing in this instance—time
that could have been spent improving the paper.
The acceptance of a paper and its publication in a peer-reviewed
journal is a mark of accomplishment that one can take pride in.
Conducting research and writing a paper has much in common
with the process of writing poetry, as elucidated by the great Rus-
sian poet Anna Akhmatova [2]
I’m careless of the ode’s exalted sentence
And of the elegy’s delicious guile.
I say the verse should ill befit the senses,
Escape the common file.
If you could know what gibberish empowers
The verse that grows, from all abashment freed,
Like dandelions’ yellow summer flowers,
Like burdock and like quinoa weed.
The freshly smelling tar, the cry of anger,
Of mold upon the wall the mystery sight...
And here it comes, the verse, both gay and tender,
To your and my delight.
ACADEMIA QUANTUM 2024, 1
https://doi.org/10.20935/AcadQuant6261
2. Community engagement
Academia Quantum is an expansion of Academia.edu, a com-
munity in which dedicated members distribute published work
through networking and file-sharing. The Academia.edu commu-
nity has evolved into a trusted group of readers, authors, review-
ers, and editors. Academia Quantum is inclusive and supports
peer-review studies from its own members and welcomes contri-
butions from all investigators in its subfields. Accepted papers will
be rapidly distributed among the Academia.edu community and
beyond, thereby ensuring maximal exposure of findings, concepts,
and opinions.
In addition to original theoretical and experimental papers, we
will also consider for publication research reviews, perspectives,
position statements, and methods, provided that there is clear
utility to the field. Our audience is very broad and includes sci-
entists in academic and industrial settings, applied engineers, as
well as students, fellows, research associates, and policy-makers.
Additional information
Received: 2024-05-27
Accepted: 2024-05-29
Published: 2024-05-31
Academia Quantum papers should be cited as Academia Quan-
tum 2024, ISSN pending, https://doi.org/10.20935/AcadQuant
6261. The journal’s official abbreviation is Acad. Quant.
Publisher's note
Academia.edu stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional affiliations. All claims expressed
in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessar-
ily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the
publisher, the editors, or the reviewers. Any product that may be
evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manu-
facturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Copyright
©2024 copyright by the authors. This article is an open
access article distributed under the terms and condi-
tions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
References
1. Bloch A. Murphy’s Law : What else can go wrong in
0002
the 21th century! New York: Price Stern Sloan; 1999. See,
respectively, Westheimer’s Discovery, p. 24, and Knowles’s
Laws (#2), p. 40.
2. Akhmatova A. I’m careless of the ode’s exalted sentence
(translated by Evgenia Sarkisyants). Available from:
https://ruverses.com/anna-akhmatova/i-have-no-use-for-
regimental-odes/4881
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https://www.academia.edu/journals/academia-quantum/about https://doi.org/10.20935/AcadQuant6261

Professor Steven K. Lamoreaux, Editor-in-Chief

Steven K. Lamoreaux has worked in both academia and industry, and his research has
covered a vast array of topics, from nuclear and particle experimental physics to quan-
tum computing and information. He received his Ph.D. in 1986 from the University of
Washington, advised by Prof. E. Norval Fortson. His dissertation, Searches for Spatial
Anisotropy and a Permanent Electric Dipole Moment using Optically Pumped Mercury
was awarded that year’s Joseph P. Henderson Prize for the outstanding Ph.D. disserta-
tion. He then became a UW postdoc and was deployed to the Institut Laue-Langevin in
Grenoble, France, where he worked on a neutron electric dipole experiment employing
ultracold neutrons (UCN) and ended up co-authoring a book on the subject of UCN. Dur-
ing the ensuing years, he spent considerable time at the Hahn-Meitner Institut in Berlin
where he continued fundamental physics studies that employed cold neutron beams. In
1996, he became a staff member at the Los Alamos National Laboratory where he initially
worked on a trapped ion quantum computer and on quantum cryptography, and later
became the Leader of the Dynamics Materials Team in the Physics Division. He was pro-
moted to Laboratory Fellow in 1999. In 2006, Steve was offered, and accepted, a Physics
faculty position at Yale and is presently the principal investigator of an astrophysics
experiment that employs quantum-enhanced measurement techniques in a search for
galactic halo dark matter in the form of axions. He recently co-authored, with R. Golub,
a book The Historical and Physical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, published by
OUP.
For his “Extensive contributions to precision measurements science,” Steve was the inau-
gural recipient of the 1999 Francis M. Pipkin Award from the American Physical Society.
He was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1996, and in 2008, he was
among the inaugural group of Outstanding Referees, a then-new honor bestowed by the
APS, currently with about 150 inductees per year.
Steve has served as the reviewer of hundreds of physics papers and grant applications and
has served on review panels and committees, including the Cost and Schedule Review of
Advanced LIGO.

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