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DailyDirt: When He's Underwater Does He Get Wet? Nobody Knows. Particle Man.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The field of modern particle physics seems like an exclusive club. Fundamental particles are literally everywhere, but it’s not quite practical to observe a Higgs Boson in your kitchen. Sure, you could build your own cloud chamber and see some cosmic rays, but making your own TeV particle collider takes a bit more expertise. Maybe experimental evidence for theoretical physics is highly overrated anyway.

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Filed Under: antiparticle, baryons, cern, glueballs, gluons, guts, large hadron collider, lhc, majorana fermion, oddballs, particle physics, pentaquark, physics, qcd, quantum chromodynamics, qubits

We’ve pointed out before how grateful we are that Tim Berners-Lee didn’t look to patent the World Wide Web in the early days, because it’s unlikely it would have developed as it did if he had. Over at CERN, where Berners-Lee worked at the time, they have an archive in which they show “the document that officially put the World Wide Web into the public domain on 30 April 1993.” Indeed, it is a great thing that CERN quickly and clearly put the main concepts behind the web into the public domain. But, as David Sleight points out it does seem rather ridiculously ironic, that in order to view the documents that “put the web into the public domain,” you have to agree to a copyright notice from CERN:

Technically, CERN is probably correct. While it put the concepts that underlie the web into the public domain, the specific images and documents are still covered by copyright. Furthermore, it’s quite likely that the “conditions of use ©” notice are just standard artifacts on basically every CERN document or image. However, it still highlights how we live in a world today where people are constantly in a default mode of “protect” everything and “lock up” everything, even in cases where it makes absolutely no sense. Does this document need copyright? Obviously not. Is there any purpose at all in having it under copyright? Not at all. And yet, it is. And that’s a sad statement on the nature of copyright today.

Filed Under: cern, copyright, intellectual property, public domain, the web, tim berners-lee, world wide web

CERN Announces Nearly All High-Energy Physics Articles Will Switch To Open Access — The Largest-Ever OA Initiative

from the well,-flip dept

One of the key insights driving open access is that if all the money currently paid by libraries and other institutions for subscriptions to academic journals was instead used to pay processing charges — effectively, the cost of publishing — all articles could be made freely available online to everyone. Unfortunately, getting from one system to the other has proved hard, since it requires many libraries to drop subscriptions and pool their resources so that enough top-quality journals can be published on an open-access basis. That’s what makes this news from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, such a milestone:

> After intense preparations and consensus building, CERN has today confirmed that the SCOAP3 Open Access publishing initiative will start on 1 January 2014. With the support of partners in 24 countries, a vast fraction of scientific articles in the field of High-Energy Physics will become Open Access at no cost for any author: everyone will be able to read them; authors will retain copyright; and generous licenses will enable wide re-use of this information.

Making the transition from conventional subscriptions to open access was possible because of CERN’s clout in the high-energy physics community, which meant that it was able to persuade a large number of funders to pool their money:

> Convened at CERN this is the largest scale global Open Access initiative ever built, involving an international collaboration of over one thousand libraries, library consortia and research organizations. SCOAP3 enjoys the support of funding agencies and has been established in co-operation with leading publishers.

That, in its turn, meant that all the top publishers were willing to participate — even Elsevier:

> Eleven publishers of high quality international journals are participating in SCOAP3. Elsevier, IOP Publishing and Springer, together with their publishing partners, have been working with the network of SCOAP3 national contact points. Reductions in subscription fees for thousands of participating libraries worldwide have been arranged, making funds available for libraries to support SCOAP3.

The importance of this move is not only that practically all high-energy physics papers will soon be available in their final, edited form — not preprints — to everyone for no cost, and under a liberal CC-BY licence that allows all kinds of re-use as well as text and data mining, but also that CERN has demonstrated that the flip from old to new academic publishing models is no mere theoretical possibility, but can actually be achieved. Now we need funders in other disciplines to follow suit by banding together and getting publishers to sign up to similar large-scale projects.

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Filed Under: cern, open access, physics

DailyDirt: The Little Things In Physics Make Big News

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Scientific discoveries often build upon past scientific discoveries, and it looks like investments in huge particle colliders are really paying off now. But even without gigantic particle accelerators, physicists have been taking some cool measurements recently. Here are just a few examples of some significant discoveries in physics that are verifying some of our models of how the universe works.

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: astrophysicists, cern, dark matter, god particle, higgs boson, neutrino, physics, science