Proceedings online

“Our goal in creating eConf is to completely displace print publishers of [physics] conference proceedings,” says eConf cofounder Michael Peskin, a physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which launched the Web site this past October (see http://www.slac.stanford.edu/econf ). The idea is to get conference proceedings—starting with high-energy physics—online quickly and cheaply, to archive them long-term, and to link them to broader, searchable publications databases, such as SLAC’s SPIRES and the electronic preprint archives at Los Alamos National Laboratory. A handful of such online archives already exist, but they are neither linked nor easily searched, says Peskin. Meanwhile, publishers of print proceedings, whose earnings eConf could eat into, are keeping close watch. The American Institute of Physics, for example, which puts out proceedings from some 50 conferences each year, foresees a continuing role for print proceedings, but also plans to start posting them electronically later this year.