The Joint Accelerator Conferences Website, (JACoW) is a website located at CERN with a mirror site at KEK, where the proceedings of accelerator conferences are published. It is also an international collaboration in the electronic publication of accelerator conference proceedings, which has led to the development and maintenance of templates for the preparation of electronic contributions to conference proceedings. Through editor and author education, it has contributed greatly to facilitating and speeding up the publication of electronic versions of conference proceedings.
JACoW came into being following the Web publication of the proceedings of the fifth European Particle Accelerator Conference (EPAC’96) when Ilan Ben-Zvi, chair of the US Particle Accelerator Conference (PAC’99) Program Commit- tee, proposed the idea of a joint PAC/EPAC website for the publication of the proceedings. Since then it has pioneered electronic publications in the accelerator field. The CYCLOTRONS, DIPAC, ICALEPCS and LINAC series of conferences have all joined the collaboration, with more in the pipeline. While the number of published proceedings now stands at 17, the project for scanning PAC conference proceedings from the pre-electronic era is rapidly swelling this number.
Because JACoW is not simply a list of URLs to other websites, each conference series is required to deliver a full set of files prepared in portable document format (PDF), according to JACoW specifications. A unique feature of the JACoW site is the custom interface that allows full Boolean searches in the metadata (the hidden fields in the PDF files), in addition to the standard full text search, across all papers presented at all major accelerator conferences.
The JACoW collaboration is now turning its attention to the database infrastructure requirements to run the scientific programmes of conferences – covering all actions from submission of abstracts through to submission of papers, with automated procedures for the preparation of files for publication on the Internet.
