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