Centennial Markov Prizes honour neutrino and accelerator physics
The centenary of Russian physicist Moisey Markov was celebrated on 14–16 May at the 6th Markov Readings held in Moscow and Dubna. In honour of the anniversary, the event saw the award of two Markov Prizes for 2008, to specialists in neutrino physics and accelerator physics.
Markov (1908–1994) made pioneering contributions to research in neutrino physics, as well as to studies of fundamental problems in elementary particle physics and quantum gravity, and on the borderline between particle physics and cosmology. The academician secretary of the Nuclear Physics Division of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR for two decades (1967–1988), Markov played a big role in the country’s development of nuclear, particle and cosmic-ray physics and neutrino astrophysics. The Markov Prize was established by the Institute for Nuclear Research (INR) of the Russian Academy of Sciences in his memory as one of the founders of the Institute.
One Markov Prize for the centennial year was awarded to Stanislav Mikheev of INR and Alexei Smirnov of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics and INR. They received the prize "for their outstanding contributions to the theory of neutrino oscillations and neutrino astrophysics that has made major impact on the interpretation of data from the institute’s unique experiments at Baksan, the Large Volume Detector and the Liquid Scintillator Detector, as well as from other experiments". They are especially well known for their work on neutrino oscillations, particularly in matter. Sergei Esin, Leonid Kravchuck and Alexandr Feschenko, all from INR, received the second centennial Markov Prize "for the outstanding contribution to the development of physics and technology of accelerators, construction and upgrade of the high current linear accelerator of the Moscow Meson Factory".
Workshop tackles scientific dissemination via open access
We hear the phrase "it’s all on the Internet" more and more frequently, but it is not true for everyone. In the western world most of the information that scholars access for research is restricted to subscribers, with subscriptions only affordable by wealthy institutions. Moreover, access to the Internet is not necessarily easy – in several countries there is extremely limited bandwidth combined with a power supply that may be highly irregular.
Open access has begun to address the first of these problems. In particle physics, for example, use of the preprint service arXiv.org means that there is basically always one version of any paper written in the last 15 years available to anyone with access to the Internet.
On 7–16 July the Science Dissemination Unit (SDU) of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), in collaboration with CERN and the International Network for the Availability of Publications, organized a workshop on how to use open-access models for scientific dissemination. Some 60 participants attended, coming from 35 different countries, mainly from the less advantaged parts of the world.
The stimulating discussions at the workshop showed that open access should not only provide an opportunity for improving access to information but also be used to augment the visibility of results from research carried out in less wealthy countries. There are still many practical issues to be solved, but there is no doubt that open access offers a level playing field to researchers across the world for accessing and disseminating scientific results.
Further reading
For more about the workshop, see http://sdu.ictp.it/openaccess. The ICTP SDU has published a free book Science Dissemination, using open access. This is available at http://sdu.ictp.it/openaccess/book.html.