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The most important website in particle physics

The first website to be hosted in the US has grown to be an invaluable hub for open science

For Symmetry Magazine:

With tens of thousands of particle physicists working in the world today, the biggest challenge a researcher can have is keeping track of what everyone else is doing. The articles they write, the collaborations they form, the experiments they run—all of those things are part of being current. After all, high-energy particle physics is a big enterprise, not the province of a few isolated people working out of basement laboratories.

Particle physicists have a tool that helps them with that. The INSPIRE database allows scientists to search for published papers by topic, author, scholarly journal, what previous papers the authors cited and which newer papers have used it as a reference.

“I don’t know any other discipline with such a central tool as INSPIRE,” says Sünje Dallmeier-Tiessen, an information scientist at CERN who manages INSPIRE’s open-access initiative. If you’re a high-energy physicist, “everything that relates to your daily work-life, you can find there.” [Read the rest at Symmetry Magazine…]