Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, August 27, 2008

OA to Large Hadron Collider docs

The complete scientific documentation on the Large Hadron Collider is now available, having been published on August 14, 2008 in a special issue of the Journal of Instrumentation. See the press release from CERN. (Thanks to Glennda Chui.)

See also Chui's comments:

... Another long, boring technical document to gather virtual dust on virtual shelves?

Not at all, judging from the continued popularity of The Stanford Two-Mile Accelerator, affectionately known as The Blue Book, which was published in 1968 to preserve the knowledge and experience gained in building the [Stanford Linear Accelerator Center] linac. The recent struggle to make it available to a wide audience shows what a milestone the open-access publication of the LHC documentation is.

Most copies of The Blue Book had vanished from the SLAC Library, and the librarians wanted to make it available electronically. But they ran into a snag: No one could figure out who owned the copyright, so there was no one to give permission to put it on the Web.

“It’s an orphan work,” SLAC archivist Jean Deken told me Friday. The original publisher was bought by another, which was bought by another, and so on. Finally, with the help of an expert from Stanford Law School, librarian Abraham Wheeler tracked down the current owner of the copyright–which said that since it could not find any documentation on the book, it could not grant permission to reproduce it.

After much legal head-scratching it was decided that SLAC could post the book online, which it did last summer. You can read about the copyright saga here, and browse the book here. ...