INSPIRE-HEP is an open access digital library for the field of high energy physics (HEP). It is the successor of the Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) database, the main literature database for high energy physics since the 1970s.
Contents
History
SPIRES was in addition to the CERN Document Server (CDS), arXiv and parts of Astrophysics Data System one of the main Particle Information Resources. A survey conducted in 2007 reached the result that the users of the SPIRES database wanted the portal to provide more services that at that time already 30-year-old system could provide. On the second annual Summit of Information Specialists in Particle Physics and Astrophysics in May 2008, the physic laboratories CERN, DESY, SLAC and Fermilab therefore announced that they will work together to create a new Scientific Information System for high energy physics called INSPIRE. It interacts with other HEP service providers like arXiv.org, Particle Data Group and NASA's Astrophysics Data System. In April 2010, a beta version of INSPIRE-HEP was freely accessible, in April 2012, it fully replaced SPIRES.
Content
INSPIRE-HEP combines the SPIRES-HEP database content with the open source digital library software Invenio and the content of the CERN Document server. In addition to scientific papers, INSPIRE-HEP provides other information like citation metrics, plots extracted from papers or internal experiment notes and tools for users to improve metadata like crowdsourcing for author disambiguation. As of August 2012, INSPIRE-HEP contains 1,1 million records. INSPIRE provides not only a literature database for the field of High-Energy Physics, but hosts also other HEP-related services: