EPJ@20 – Celebrating 20 Years of the European Physical Journal
This article was originally published in EPN 49/5-6.
2018 saw the 20th anniversary of the founding of EPJ, the European Physical Journal. Launched in 1998, EPJ brought together the combined strengths of some long-established national European physics journals, starting with the initial merger of Journal de Physique, Il Nuovo Cimento and Zeitschrift für Physik, and continuing with the adoption and in- corporation of Acta Physica Hungarica, Anales de Fisica, Czechoslovak Journal of Physics, Fizika A, and Portugaliae Physica.The EPJ Scienti c Advisory Committee includes now members from 25 European learned societies.
Since those beginnings, EPJ has expanded its geographical reach well beyond Europe and has a much more international and diverse authorship. Its spectrum of journals – 17 by now (www.epj.org) – includes all traditional and emerging fields where the physical sciences contribute significantly to research agendas worldwide. These include, for example the highly successful EPJ Data Science, a journal representing a melting pot of physicists, computer scientists and researchers with many other backgrounds in the natural and social sciences, and EPJ Quantum Technology, a title launched in response to the huge investment in quantum-related science, technology and engineering in Europe and worldwide.
EPJ still maintains the principle of active editorial board members being in charge of a personalized refereeing process. Equally it is the same editorial boards that provide the crucial input for shaping and adapting the editorial scope and policies of the EPJ journals, in line with the needs and wishes of the scientic communities they serve, in a self-consistent way.
Publishing developments at EPJ over the past years have been fast paced toward enabling the progressive opening of the journal contents, both by giving the option of publishing in Open Access in the traditional journals, turning EPJ C to full Open Access in support of SCOAP3 and offering some new journals as full Open Access outlets. Since 2016, as part of a wider Springer Nature initiative(1), the traditional EPJ journals do also feature the SharedIt link, a free content sharing tool that allows everyone, anywhere to read the full contents of the journals, whether they have a subscription or not.
The complexity of operations has grown accordingly, involving a publishing team of colleagues spread across Europe and cultivating both European and global networks. Heidelberg, Bologna, Milan, Paris, Dordrecht and London are the hubs from where the majority of the connections emanate. Considerably more focus, investments and expertise will be required for the gradual but steady implementation of an ambitious open science program, better control of research integrity and publishing ethics and development of novel technologies to make the tools and platforms that enable scientists to fulfill their publishing needs.
EPJ’s strengths continues thereby to reside in a healthy collaboration and balance between scientific, commercial, and societal aspects, with the shared goal of providing a sustainable publishing infra- structure that plays a crucial part in the research communication and knowledge generation cycles.
(1) EPJ is a common brand of EDP Sciences/French Physical Society, Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer Nature
