Particle physicists push for publishing changes

The high-energy physics community wants all of its published research to be freely available to everybody. Jens Vigen reports on how a radical new initiative hopes to achieve this

Abrakadabra, hokuspokus filiokus simsalabim - OAI-PMH!

The paper describes in a popular manner the history of the scientific communication process, the serials crisis and the new technologies leading to a paradigm change in the communication pattern between scholars. If librarians play their cards properly now, publishers will soon experience a downsizing while the role of the libraries in Academia will be even more strongly justified than before

Digital content sewed together within a library catalogue WebLib - The CERN Document Server

Aggregation, harvesting, personalization techniques, portals, service provision, etc. have all become buzzwords. Most of them simply describing what librarians have been doing for hundreds of years. Prior to the Web few people outside the libraries were concerned about these issues, a situation which today it is completely turned upside down. Hopefully the new actors on the arena of knowledge management will take full advantage of all the available "savoir faire". At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, librarians and informaticians have set up a complete system, WebLib, actually based on the traditional library catalogue. Digital content is, within this framework, being integrated to the highest possible level in order to meet the strong requirements of the particle physics community. The paper gives an overview of the steps CERN has made towards the digital library from the day the laboratory conceived the World Wide Web to present

A sustainable business model for Open-Access journal publishing : a proposed plan for High-Energy Physics

Intervention au 36e congrès LIBER qui s\u27est tenu à Varsovie du 3 au 7 juillet 2007. Présentation d\u27un modèle de publication de revues scientifiques en archives ouvertes dans le domaine de la physique des particules

On the golden road - Open Access publishing in particle physics

The goal of Open Access (OA) is to grant anyone, anywhere and anytime free access to the results of scientific research. The High-Energy Physics (HEP) community has pioneered OA with its “pre-print culture”: the mass mailing, first, and the online posting, later, of preliminary versions of its articles. After almost half a century of widespread dissemination of pre-prints, the time is ripe for the HEP community to explore OA publishing. Among other possible models, a sponsoring consortium appears as the most viable option for a transition of HEP peer-reviewed literature to OA. A Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) is proposed as a central body which would remunerate publishers for the peer-review service, effectively replacing the “reader-pays” model of traditional subscriptions with an “author-side” funding. Funding to SCOAP3 would come from HEP funding agencies and library consortia through a re-direction of subscriptions. This model is discussed in details together with a quantitative description of the HEP publishing landscape leading to a practical proposal for a seamless transition of HEP peer-reviewed literature to OA publishing

Une offre de services adaptée aux chercheurs

Ayant l'un des groupes de lecteurs les plus exigeants dans le monde scientifique et des ressources comparables à celles d'une collection de moyenne bibliothèque universitaire, le Service de l'Information Scientifique du CERN utilise toute sa créativité pour ne pas disparaître entre l'offre et la demande. Le CERN a pour but d'être un centre d'excellence dans le domaine de la physique des hautes energies et des technologies connexes. Le Service d'Information Scientifique réalise cet objectif en préservant la mémoire des développements de la physique et en appliquant les technologies avancées des sciences de l'information et du commerce électronique

Quantitative Analysis of the Publishing Landscape in High-Energy Physics

World-wide collaboration in high-energy physics (HEP) is a tradition which dates back several decades, with scientific publications mostly coauthored by scientists from different countries. This coauthorship phenomenon makes it difficult to identify precisely the ``share'' of each country in HEP scientific production. One year's worth of HEP scientific articles published in peer-reviewed journals is analysed and their authors are uniquely assigned to countries. This method allows the first correct estimation on a ``pro rata'' basis of the share of HEP scientific publishing among several countries and institutions. The results provide an interesting insight into the geographical collaborative patterns of the HEP community. The HEP publishing landscape is further analysed to provide information on the journals favoured by the HEP community and on the geographical variation of their author bases. These results provide quantitative input to the ongoing debate on the possible transition of HEP publishing to an Open Access model.Comment: For a better on-screen viewing experience this paper can also be obtained at: http://doc.cern.ch/archive/electronic/cern/preprints/open/open-2006-065.pd