Seven major articles on the LHC and its detectors have been published electronically in a special issue of the Journal of Instrumentation (JINST). Together they form the complete scientific documentation on the design and construction of the LHC machine and the six detectors (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, LHCf and TOTEM), and thus on the entire LHC project.
This landmark publication is probably the first time for a major new accelerator project to be documented in such a comprehensive, coherent, and up-to-date manner prior to going into operation. The papers should for many years to come serve as key references for the stream of scientific results that will begin to emerge from the LHC after the first collisions next year. They provide a much-needed update of the Technical Design Reports, some of which are now 10 years old.
Although published in a refereed scientific journal, the articles are completely free to download and read online under an Open Access scheme, without requiring a journal subscription. JINST is an online-only journal published jointly by the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, and the IOP Publishing in Bristol, under the scientific direction of Amos Breskin from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Since commencing in 2006, it has quickly become popular in the LHC community as a platform for publishing techincal papers.
With 1600 pages authored by 8000 scientists and engineers the special issue is the most significant manifestation of CERN’s Open Access policy thus far. It is an important milestone on the road to converting all particle-physics literature to Open Access under the initiative of the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3).
