Global Design Effort for the ILC launches new website and online publication
The Global Design Effort (GDE) for the International Linear Collider (ILC) has launched a new website, www.linearcollider.org, together with ILC NewsLine, a weekly electronic newsletter reporting news and information about the next-generation particle accelerator from around the world.
ILC NewsLine is written for the global particle-physics community and non-scientists, and is available online and e-mailed free to subscribers. It includes news about the latest ILC developments, reports from conferences and workshops worldwide, statements from the GDE director and regional directors, and profiles about the international scientists and engineers that are collaborating to design a future particle accelerator. The website includes ILC news, a calendar of upcoming events, announcements and technical and scientific documents.
ILC NewsLine is jointly written and produced on behalf of the global ILC community by the GDE communicators in the Americas, Europe and Asia, who welcome submissions and ideas for newsletter content. To subscribe to ILC NewsLine, see www.linearcollider.org/newsline.
Letters
CERN Courier welcomes letters from readers. Please e-mail cern.courier@cern.ch . We reserve the right to edit letters.
Sponsoring open access: more than just wry amusement
I am delighted to witness the high interest in open access that exists and has been demonstrated by the series of letters on the topic recently published in these pages. In addition, a well-attended debate on "The changing publishing model" held at CERN in September shows that physicists are concerned with this issue.
Following the endorsement of the new CERN publishing policy in March, the library has taken certain steps to support open access where it can. It is therefore my pleasure to announce that CERN will be, as of 2006, the first European financial sponsor of Physical Review Special Topics - Accelerators and Beams. I hope publishers and editors of journals in particle physics will also consider a similar model: in the current climate a publishing model based on sponsorship shows significant potential, at least for the mega-sciences.
For the future, I would like to propose that we do not mix peer-review and long-term archiving into the debate. Both are of obvious importance, but neither is relevant to the difference between open-access publishing and the traditional model. The open-access model can of course incorporate peer-review, and with regards to archiving, even traditional subscription journals will most likely be electronic-only in a few years. The real debate is how to finance publishing activities and at the same time ensure equal access for everyone to results from publicly funded research.
A change to full open-access publishing cannot be made by one of the actors in the publishing chain alone. CERN is therefore hosting, in December, a tripartite meeting, which will include funding agencies, research organizations and publishers who already implement some form of open-access publishing. At the workshop we will hope to use our years of open-access experience to work out a common strategy for the transition to the new publishing paradigm.
Corrado Pettenati, CERN Library.
George Placzek revisited
The physics community will welcome Jan Fischer's article "George Placzek - an unsung hero of physics" (see CERN Courier Sept 2005 p25) on the life and work of Jewish physicist George Placzek, who was born in Brno in 1905.
As an addendum to the article, I would like to tell readers of Placzek's brief appointment in the physics department of the newly established Hebrew University in Jerusalem (opened in 1925). Placzek worked there for just six months during the academic year 1934-1935. Before arriving, he had received an unusual request from the university. In August 1934 Leonard Ornstein informed him that the language of teaching in Jerusalem is Hebrew, but the use of another language is permitted for one year (I Unna 2000 Phys. Perspect.
Placzek's difficulty in using Hebrew to teach physics was also mentioned by Otto Frisch (O R Frisch 1979 What Little I Remember Cambridge University Press). Frisch wrote: "We later had numerous communications from [Placzek in] Israel; how at first he had to fend off the persistent requests from the university authorities that he should give his lectures in Hebrew, which he had not yet learned. They gave him a year to learn Hebrew. (He learned Arabic as well.) When at the end of that year he still wouldn't give lectures in Hebrew - he felt the language couldn't cope with modern physics - and they insisted on it, there was a telegram "Through with Jews for ever", and he came back to Denmark."
Min-Liang Wong, College of Veterinary Medicine, National Chung-Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan.