INSPIRE, the next-generation high energy physics information system, announced on June 11^th that the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IHEP) has become the first Asian member of 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.

After joining the team, IHEP will first focus on enhancing the 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.

As the most prestigious research center in China for particle physics, advanced accelerator physics and technologies, and radiation technologies and applications, IHEP is now one of the world’s leading scientific research centers. IHEP’s Information Services Department plays a crucial role in collecting, curating and providing scientific information for researchers in China.

With strong support from IHEP and the other four laboratories, YU Runsheng, IHEP’s Head of Information Services, visited Fermilab on May 8^th to speak at the INSPIRE Advisory Board meeting, where he outlined IHEP’s plans to contribute to INSPIRE. After a closed-door discussion, the INSPIRE team unanimously agreed that IHEP become the first Asian member to join the INSPIRE collaboration.

This new partnership is an exciting step forward in the way INSPIRE has evolved over the last four decades. INSPIRE’s predecessor, SPIRES, started in the ’70s as a High-Energy Physics publication database, jointly operated by SLAC and DESY. As of 2007, with CERN joining as a partner, the INSPIRE collaboration was born. A totally new infrastructure and augmented services were launched in 2010, replacing SPIRES with the modern INSPIRE.

This new platform provides its users with faster results, a variety of search and display options, detailed record pages, searchable fulltext for all arXiv content, figures and searchable figure captions extracted from recent arXiv articles, LHC experimental notes, personalized features (author pages, paper claiming), fulltext search and snippet display for recent arXiv articles and material from some publishers, author disambiguation for high-quality profiles, and improved search capabilities linked with other HEP databases.

For the original INSPIRE news item, please visit:

http://inspirehep.net/info/ihep-joins-inspire or http://blog.inspirehep.net/2014/06/ihep-joins-inspire.html