Description
Situated in Gif-sur-Yvette, 20Km south-west of Paris, the "Institut de Physique Théorique (IPhT)" is an institute of the French "Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission" (CEA) which is also a joint research unit of the French "National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)" and is affiliated with the University of Paris-Saclay.
Theoretical physics courses have regularly been taking place at the IPhT since 1996. Held by IPhT staff researchers or by invited experts, open to everyone, these courses are followed by graduate students and researchers of the Paris area alike. Starting from 2021, the courses are also broadcast live, allowing students and researchers from all over the world to interactively join the lectures.
As seen from the online courses archive, the level of an IPhT course is willingly open and decided on a case-by-case basis, ranging from pedagogical presentations of a standard, well-established subject to the latest advances in a rapidly-developing topic. The subjects encompass traditional theoretical physics – mathematical physics, high energy physics, cosmology, statistical physics, condensed matter, and so on – but may go beyond towards mathematics, computer science, biology and any scientific subject that might appeal to the curiosity and the interests of the students and researchers at the IPhT.
Most of the IPhT courses are accompanied by lecture notes. As of June 2017, video-recordings of the lectures are usually made available on the YouTube channel.
Started in 2022, "The IPhT Lecture Notes" series, part of the "SciPost Physics Lecture Notes", continue the open-knowledge policy underlying the IPhT courses by collecting and disseminating in an open-access, high quality form the best IPhT course lecture notes.
Lecture notes are to be individually submitted to "SciPost Physics Lecture Notes, The IPhT Lecture Notes Series" by the lecturers, and are thereafter subjected to SciPost thorough peer-witnessed refereeing process. Once accepted and published as citable versions of record, these papers are then arranged in a special Collection grouping all the IPhT lecture notes of a given academic year.
As per all SciPost publication venues, publications in "SciPost Physics Lecture Notes, The IPhT Lecture Notes Series" are fully-fledged scientific publications enjoying all the benefits of SciPost's Genuine Open Access services and infrastructure, including among others free access for readers, no publication fee for authors, and a CC-BY Open Access license with copyright to authors.
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Collections in this Series
Detailed information (show/hide)
General information for authors
Authoring information
The authors should prepare their lecture notes following the authoring instructions for SciPost Physics Lecture Notes.
Upon submission, mention should be made that the manuscript is destined for the IPhT Lecture Notes Series.
If the manuscript is first put on arXiv, then the "Comments" field there should mention "Submitted to SciPost Physics Lecture Notes, The IPhT Lecture Notes Series".
Editorial process
The editorial processing of submissions will follow the general procedure standardly used at SciPost. In particular, submissions are subjected to SciPost's thorough peer-witnessed refereeing process.
Publication
Publication of the lecture notes will take place on an individual basis, as soon as a particular submission's editorial process has been completed.
Once accepted, the lecture notes are individually published as citable versions of record with their own DOI, fully Open Access, CC-BY license with copyright to authors etc (as per all publications at SciPost).
The published lecture notes for the IPhT courses of a particular academic year are then perpetually hosted on a dedicated web page on scipost.org.
Financial arrangements
As per SciPost's business model, authors do not have to pay anything. SciPost does not charge subscription costs nor imposes Article Processing Charges to authors.
There is however a simple and very appreciated thing authors can do to help SciPost's sustainability: they could encourage their home institutions and funding agencies to familiarize themselves with SciPost's business model and to join SciPost's sponsorship scheme (unless they are already listed among SciPost's current sponsors ).