The INSPIRE Advisory Board meets once a year to hear about progress in the services and feedback from the user community. We recently took stock of progress in our service, its hardware, software, and the new areas we are starting to focus on.

Our Advisory Board counts seven experimental and theoretical physicists from the participating laboratories and the community at large, plus the manager of our sister service NASA Astrophysics Data System. The 2014 meeting took place at Fermilab in May. INSPIRE staff from the five participating laboratories (CERN, DESY, IHEP, Fermilab and SLAC) presented to the Advisory Board an extensive overview of the team’s work during the previous year, along with current challenges and future directions. Among the topics were the organization of our service, the user feedback, the content selection and processing.

The meeting of the INSPIRE Advisory Board is a great opportunity for the INSPIRE team to reflect on the last year’s achievement. We are proud to share some highlights with our entire user community:

  • We made extensive operational improvements to the INSPIRE infrastructure, including new hardware and architecture, major refactoring of the INSPIRE code base, and significant process improvements. While invisible to users, these improvements ensure continuing speed and reliability and allow us to prepare for future development.
  • We mused about future directions for the design of INSPIRE and how to bring together our classic search experience with interaction design and modern web design standards, especially for new services such as author profiles and a more efficient submission of corrections and feedback.
  • We realized how much effort we were able to devote to support open research data. In addition to helping make the ATLAS Higgs likelihood available in a citable way, we also started to link papers to code from GitHub, and integrated third-party data repositories.
  • We reviewed all new content we have been adding to INSPIRE: daily upload of the LHC experimental notes CMS-PAS, ATLAS-CONF, and LHCb-CONF, increased coverage of nuclear physics, and the upload of the PDFs of approximately 10,000 relevant articles from Proceedings of Science, which are now searcheable.
  • We invested additional resources to meet expectations of a timely update of references, authors, and other information of articles we receive from arXiv and beyond. Parts of this process are still manual. During the last year we cleared over 10,000 existing tasks. Our ongoing backlog is now around 1,500 tasks, the lowest in several years. It usually takes us between a day and less than a month to process these tasks.
  • The meeting was an ideal opportunity to welcome IHEP as a new member of the INSPIRE collaboration.

The meeting was an enjoyable, lively exchange, providing lots of food for thought as INSPIRE moves forward.

During the course of our conversations, John Beacom, Advisory Board member, was “impressed with the significant efficiency gains for internal processes and author disambiguation, and strongly encourages further co-operation with ADS to improve coverage of astrophysics and cosmology.”

Our recent efforts in handling experimental data within INSPIRE are being appreciated by the Advisory Board. Kyle Cranmer remarked that “data and code are becoming increasingly important as research products, treating them as first class citizens within INSPIRE is an exciting new direction for the field.” Michelangelo Mangano was “impressed by the rapid response of the INSPIRE team to all suggestions from the community and the Advisory Board, and look[s] forward to continued progress in streamlining the access to the experimental data, also in cooperation with the HEPdata project.”

The INSPIRE Advisory Board is an invaluable source of insight and a trusted representative of the community we serve. Its input, together with the hundreds of e-mails and suggestions we receive from our community make sure that INSPIRE stays true to its course: to be an indispensable service for the High Energy Physics community worldwide.


The INSPIRE team is excited to announce that the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IHEP) has joined the INSPIRE collaboration. IHEP is the fifth laboratory to contribute to this global effort at the service of the worldwide High-Energy Physics community, alongside CERN, DESY, Fermilab and SLAC.

This new partnership is an exciting step in the way our services have evolved over the last four decades. The INSPIRE predecessor, SPIRES, started in the ‘70s as a High-Energy Physics publication database, jointly operated by SLAC and DESY. From a dissemination of printed lists of pre-prints and articles, SPIRES then was searchable by email and became the first website in North America and first database accessible through the World Wide Web in 1991. Having started supporting the effort in the ‘90s, Fermilab fully joined the team in the early 2000s. As of 2007, with the arrival of CERN, the INSPIRE collaboration was born. A fully new infrastructure and augmented services were launched in 2010, replacing SPIRES with the modern INSPIRE. As High-Energy Physics is becoming truly global, with stronger and stronger collaborations across the three regions, IHEP becomes the first Asian member to join the INSPIRE collaboration.

As the most prestigious research center of particle physics, advanced accelerator physics and technologies, and radiation technologies and application in China, IHEP both supports established scientists and nourishes young talents ever since its establishment. With decades of development, IHEP is now one of the leading scientific research centers in the world. The information services department of IHEP plays a crucial role in collecting, curating and providing scientific information for researchers in China. A leader in global collaboration in China, in 1994 IHEP became the first institution in the country to have a fully operational world-wide Internet connection. IHEP led the way for other Chinese scientific institutes in using advanced information technology and making scholarly works publicly available to the global community. These achievements resonate with the mission of INSPIRE: to create a community based information system that supports scholarly communication.

Under strong support from IHEP and the other four laboratories, on May 8th Runsheng Yu of the IHEP information services department visited Fermilab to speak at the INSPIRE Advisory Board meeting. He outlined IHEP’s plans to contribute to INSPIRE, and we expect to see great improvements in the disambiguation of Chinese physicists’ names both at their home institute and worldwide. IHEP is working hard to enhance Chinese HEPNames records, which will make it much easier to differentiate Chinese authors from one another and give them the recognition they deserve. This work must be done by hand in order to ensure the accuracy of the information in the database.

We look forward to a long and harmonious collaboration with IHEP, and are excited to be reaching further out to the HEP community worldwide with our first partner in Asia.

Collaborative post by Xiaoli Chen and Melissa Clegg