Ministers meeting at the end of January for the Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) have acknowledged the importance of ensuring access to large-scale research infrastructures in high-energy physics and of the long-term vitality of the field. The ministers also noted the worldwide consensus of the scientific community in choosing an electron-positron linear collider as the next accelerator-based facility to complement and expand on discoveries that are likely to emerge from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. They agreed that the planning and implementation of such a large, multi-year project should be carried out on a global basis, and should involve consultations among not only scientists but also representatives of science funding agencies from interested countries.
At their previous meeting in 1999, the ministers had endorsed the creation of the OECD Global Science Forum, which provided a useful venue for consultations among senior science policy officials and programme managers, and was a valuable mechanism for bringing together government officials with representatives of scientific communities. Now, at the January 2004 meeting, the ministers were in a position to devote their attention to the forum’s work concerning high-energy physics. In particular the ministers endorsed the statement prepared by the forum’s Consultative Group on High-Energy Physics and noted several important points that were articulated in the group’s report. These included the need to have large, next-generation facilities funded, designed, built and operated as global-scale collaborations; the need to educate, attract and train young people in the fields of high-energy physics, astrophysics and cosmology; and the need for a strong international R&D collaboration and studies of the various issues required to realize the next major accelerator facility on the consultative group’s roadmap – a next-generation electron-positron collider with a significant period of concurrent running with the LHC.
