Paris

France's national research agency, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), is to establish a French arm of the Los Alamos preprint archives of physics papers. The move is part of wider plans being discussed by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) to upgrade and internationalize the archives.

The French arm, the Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe, will be based in Lyons and will consist of a handful of full-time computer scientists and engineers. Physicist Franck Laloe, who will head the unit, says it will be much more than a mirror site, aiming to develop the archives and extend them to other disciplines.

Ginsparg: backs international collaboration.

An international steering committee will meet later this month to advise the centre; it includes Paul Ginsparg, the founder of the Los Alamos archives, and Martin Blume, editor in chief of the American Physical Society.

“It's marvellous that CNRS are forward-looking enough to try to forge the first formal elements of an international collaboration, and also to move beyond the primary physics and math components of the existing archives into other fields,” says Ginsparg. “Ultimately, one could imagine every research institution and/or every funding agency joining in to help create the underlying data network.”

Ginsparg has long argued that research institutions and their funding agencies should take greater control of the publication of raw research results.

“The costs of publishing on the Internet are a tiny fraction of what institutions pay in salaries and overheads for the research itself, and in this way they can ensure that the primary literature is made freely available,” he says, adding that the cost of maintaining the Los Alamos archives is as little as one dollar per article.

Blume says he is “delighted” about the CNRS decision. “At the meeting, I will encourage discussion about the establishment of an international consortium to support Paul Ginsparg in the operation and funding of his archive.”

The IUPAP working group on communication in physics, which Blume chairs, last month recommended that the union should “play a role in assuring that there is international participation” in funding the archives, assuring availability and, if possible, aiding their operation “by mobilizing physics societies worldwide”.

One drawback of the archives at present, says Blume, is that submissions can only be made through Los Alamos. To improve the situation, software needs to be developed that will allow submissions to be made at any one of the several mirror sites worldwide, he adds.

The American Physical Society (APS) initially viewed the archives as a competitor, but it is now actively collaborating. Since last year it has mirrored the archives, and uses them as an electronic submission procedure for APS journals.