Physicists Thriving with Paperless Publishing

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development and impact of paperless publishing and digital libraries in high energy physics, highlighting the SPIRES-HEP database and the Los Alamos E-print archives as pioneering efforts.

Contribution

It introduces the first comprehensive digital database for high energy physics literature and examines its influence on research practices and publishing trends.

Findings

Over 400,000 articles indexed in SPIRES-HEP

Nearly 50% of articles linked to full-text electronic versions

70% of papers eventually published in journals

Abstract

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY) libraries have been comprehensively cataloguing the High Energy Particle Physics (HEP) literature online since 1974. The core database, SPIRES-HEP, now indexes over 400,000 research articles, with almost 50% linked to fulltext electronic versions (this site now has over 15 000 hits per day). This database motivated the creation of the first site in the United States for the World Wide Web at SLAC. With this database and the invention of the Los Alamos E-print archives in 1991, the HEP community pioneered the trend to "paperless publishing" and the trend to paperless access; in other words, the "virtual library." We examine the impact this has had both on the way scientists research and on paper-based publishing. The standard of work archived at Los Alamos is very high. 70% of papers are eventually published in journals and another 20% are in conference proceedings. As a service to authors, the SPIRES-HEP collaboration has been ensuring that as much information as possible is included with each bibliographic entry for a paper. Such meta-data can include tables of the experimental data that researchers can easily use to perform their own analyses as well as detailed descriptions of the experiment, citation tracking, and links to full-text documents.