Future of Physics publishing
In Paris, during the last week of August 2014, the largest European meeting of the community of solid state physicists to place. This meeting was co-organised by the EPS’ Condensed Matter Division [EPS CMD] and the Condensed Matter Division of the French Physical Society [SFP].
In a special (parallel) session on Wednesday afternoon, the “future of physics publishing” was discussed with an audience of around 100 participants. Bart van Tiggelen (CNRS and SFP) introduced the session with remarks about…
Jean-Michel Raimond wins EPS Edison-Volta Prize 2014
The European Physical Society [EPS] has the pleasure to announce that the 2014 EPS Edison-Volta Prize is awarded to Jean-Michel Raimond for “seminal contribution to physics (that) have paved the way for novel explorations of quantum mechanics and have opened new routes in quantum information processing”.
J.-M. Raimond’s PhD thesis was supervised by Serge Haroche at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, in the early 1980′s, and together S. Haroche, M. Brune and J.-M. Raimond have built an extremely successful research group since then. J.-M. Raimond has made seminal contributions to the development of cavity QED experiments, in particular…
Executive Committee Meeting Summary
For its January meeting, the EPS Executive Committee met at The Institute of Physics [IOP] premises, Portland Place, London, on the same day as the IOP council. During a joint lunch, the EPS president gave a short overview of EPS’s activities to the Council and there were fruitful discussions between IOP Council and EPS Executive Committee members.
Traditionally, a large fraction of discussions in January is turned towards the preparation of agenda items for the EPS Council meeting in spring. The preliminary accounts 2013 are part of this, as well as on-going activities such as…
SCOAP3 launched on 1 January 2014
As of 1 January 2014, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics [SCOAP3] has become operational.
SCOAP3 contributes to the on-going evolution of the publication landscape by proposing a completely new approach for the high-energy and particle physics community. SCOAP3 is a new paradigm in scientific publication, relying on the redirection of funding from a large number of organisations and universities in order to cover publication expenses…
EPS Executive Committee Meeting in Budapest
As a satellite meeting to the European Energy Conference and the EPS General Meeting in Budapest, the EPS Executive Committee [ExCom] met in the Hungarian capital at the end of October.
The ExCom approved the final version of the position paper “Managing the transition to Open Access”, which is an outcome of the Round Table that EPS organised with partners at the EPS Council 2013. Other learned societies (e.g. EuCheMS) have also endorsed…
EPS ExCom: statements, publications and action committees
The first meeting of the EPS Executive Committee under the presidency of John Dudley was held at EPS premises in Mulhouse, France, on 8 June 2013.
During this meeting, a longer discussion was devoted to the drafts of various EPS statements. As a federation and a learned society, EPS issues statements on actual topics of science policy. The mechanism to achieve consensus requires coordination and compromise. A statement on Open Access, prepared with other European Learned Societies as…
Open Access: a challenge on the boil for scientists and publishers
A Round Table session on Open Access, introduced and moderated by Professor Sir John Enderby, President of the Institute of Physics [IoP] from 2004 to 2006, was hosted during the 2013 EPS Council meeting. Participants with various interests and backgrounds confronted their views on the evolving landscape of scientific publications. Professor Enderby opened the discussions by a presentation of the different, counteracting interests in scientific publications of researchers, funders, librarians and information managers, publishers, small and medium enterprises, and the general public. The recent statements by governments on the implementation of open access [OA]…
Council 2013: Results and new horizons
The annual meeting of the EPS Council was hosted by the University of Strasbourg in the premises of the Institut de Science et d’Ingénierie Supramoléculaires, attended by around 80 participants: the members of the EPS Executive Committee, the representatives of EPS Individual Members, Member Societies and Associate Institutions, and the chairs of EPS Divisions and Groups.
One of the main items was the official launch of the EPS study on “The importance of physics to the economies…
Silver medal for the EPS President-elect
President-elect John Dudley has been awarded the French National Centre for Scientific Research [CNRS] silver medal 2013 for his scientific achievements in the fields of nonlinear optics, ultrafast photonics, optical techniques and supercontinuum generation. John’s research activities focus equally on experimental and theoretical studies in nonlinear optics, with particular emphasis on optical fibre propagation, ultrafast metrology, noise and instabilities, and nonlinear dynamics in general. Rogue waves and the analogy of optics and hydrodynamics approaches are among his actual research interests. John is a co-laureate of an ERC Advanced Grant to study the mathematics and physics…
Summary of EPS ExCom Meeting, October 2012
At the end of October 2012, the European Physical Society’s Executive Committee met at the Ettore Majorana Scientific Centre in Erice, Italy, in parallel with the kick-off under the chairmanship of H. Wenninger. The common location allowed the ExCom to learn about ongoing work and future evolution of the TIG.
The very recent endorsement of the International Year of Light 2015 by UNESCO was, of course, one of the highlights of the agenda of the ExCom meeting…
1st EPS Conference on Physics for Development
Convinced by the need to put forward common solutions, the EPS Physics for Development Group [EPS PDG] organized the first EPS Conference on Physics for Development.
The declared aim of the conference was to bring together a large audience of stakeholders, decision makers and concerned physicists from various countries to discuss important issues regarding the role of physics in economic and social development. The Conference focused on issues such as the coordination of existing efforts and programmes, …
CERN has launched SCOAP3
The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics [SCOAP3] was officially at CERN on 1 October 2012.
This new publishing model, which grants free access to peer-reviewed articles in particle physics, redirects the funding traditionally spent by libraries for subscriptions to an internationally coordinated common fund.
Twelve publishers have been retained in the first call for tender…
