Sir

I used to feel a great sense of security in my job as editor of Physical Review Letters. Receipts continue to increase, the journals of the American Physical Society are leading in most aspects of electronic publishing, and, of course, an editor could never be replaced by a computer program.

Alas, your Briefing on electronic journals tells me I am an endangered species (Nature 397, 195–200; 1999). Apparently the Journal of High Energy Physics already has a robot that reads manuscripts and assigns them to referees. I imagine your reporter meant to say “assigns them to editors”. And, according to a picture in your article, my boss Martin Blume has become a web page! He was spotted in the editor-in-chief's office recently, so that must have been a printer's error.

No doubt the electronic future will have robots that will avoid such errors, but will readers be able to trust them?

Please tell me that editors are really needed.