Description
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) is a research institute and postgraduate training center for physicists and mathematicians. Located in Trieste, Italy, it operates under a tripartite agreement between the Italian Government, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
The ICTP was founded in 1964 by Nobel laureate Abdus Salam, who envisioned it as a place where scientists from all over the world could come together to collaborate on research and learn from each other. The ICTP has since become a leading center for physics and mathematics, and its programs have helped to train thousands of scientists.
Dedicated to promoting scientific excellence and international cooperation through science, the ICTP is a unique institution that plays an important role in helping to build scientific capacity in developing countries and in advancing fundamental scientific knowledge.
The ICTP Lecture Notes Series contains material related to one of the various ICTP activities or lecture notes co-authored by ICTP members. The publications will benefit from all the advantages of the SciPost Genuine Open Access standards thus making them available to the widest audience worldwide.
Each contribution of this Series is submitted to the journal SciPost Physics Lecture Notes and are therefore subjected to a thorough peer-witnessed refereeing process. Once accepted and published as citable versions of record, these papers are here collected and labeled following the six main ICTP Research Sections (HECAP, CMSP, MATH, ESP, QLS, STI).
As per all SciPost publication venues, publications in SciPost Physics Lecture Notes (the ICTP 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.
Collections in this Series
Detailed information (show/hide)
Publishing setup
Each individual lecture notes will be published in our journal SciPost Physics Lecture Notes;
Before publication, submissions are subjected to our thorough peer-witnessed refereeing process;
Once accepted, they 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 lecture notes for a particular school are then arranged in a special thematic Collection perpetually hosted on a dedicated web page on scipost.org.
You can find more information about SciPost Physics Lecture Notes, including its acceptance criteria, here.
Financial arrangements
As per our business model, school organizers and authors do not have to pay anything (SciPost does not charge subscription costs or impose APCs (Article Processing Charges) to authors).
There is however a simple thing you can do to help SciPost's sustainability: if your home institutions and funding agencies are not already listed among our current sponsors, we would appreciate it if you encouraged them to familiarize themselves with our business model and to join our sponsorship scheme.
As organizer
To set things up, we need the following from you:
- The link to the ICTP webpage of the school;
- The Research Section to which this school belongs to;
- Any additional information (such as a description of the school (at most 3 or 4 paragraphs), any image(s) you want displayed, extra logo to be added in the webpage).
Only the lecturers of a specific school (or eventually their co-authors) can submit a manuscript to the corresponding Collection. The organizers of the school have provided us with a list of lecturers (or equivalently the ICTP webpage of the school), for whom the submission pathway is available.
If, as a lecturer, you write your lecture notes with one or more co-authors and would like one of them to submit the manuscript, please send us a list of co-authors to edadmin@scipost.org at least a few days before submission.
As soon as we have received this information from you, we will activate a page for your Collection. This page will contain the info you have given, and will also offer direct links to the submissions undergoing editorial processing, as well as to the finalized publications. This web page will be permanently served.
As ICTP lecturer
To set up the Lecture Notes webpage, we simply need the following from you:
- A short description of the context in which the Lecture Notes were prepared (e.g. Diploma programme, for a school, for a conference);
- The list of authors;
- The Research Section to which this Lecture Note belongs to;
- The link to the ICTP webpage of the event (optional);
- Any additional information (e.g. any image(s) you want displayed, extra logo to be added in the webpage).
Only the authors that were specified the above to the editorial administration can submit a manuscript to the ICTP Lecture Notes, for whom the submission pathway is available.
As soon as we have received this information from you, we will activate a page for your Lecture Note. This page will contain the info you have given, and will also offer direct links to the submissions undergoing editorial processing, as well as to the finalized publications. This web page will be permanently served.
Authoring information
Your lecturers 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 ICTP Lecture Notes Series and a Research Section (among HECAP, CMSP, MATH, ESP, QLS, and STI) should be added in the Comments field. If the paper is first put on arXiv, then the Comments field should mention Submitted to SciPost Physics Lecture Notes, ICTP Lecture Notes Series.
Editorial process
The editorial processing of submissions will follow the general procedures used at SciPost.
Who will take charge of handling the submissions?
As organizers, you will have two options:
we can set up a Guest Fellowship for you, enabling you to take charge of the editorial process for the incoming submissions pertaining to your school;
alternately, you can leave the editorial process fully in the hands of the Editorial College (Physics).
Note that these options are not mutually exclusive: we are happy for you to take up a Guest Fellowship even if you take charge of only a fraction of the submissions to your school's Collection. Having a guest Fellowship is in fact a good way of gaining first-hand experience with SciPost's editorial protocols.
Irrespective of whether you act as Guest Fellows or not, the Editorial College (Physics) will oversee the process leading to the final publication decisions.
Reviewing
To ensure the highest possible quality of the published lecture notes, submissions should be thoroughly reviewed. This is achieved through our open peer-witnessed refereeing protocol (see description which relies on both invited and contributed reports.
If you are not editor-in-charge of a particular submission, you are of course welcome to contribute a report on it.
An obvious further source of reviewers is the set of participants in your school: these doctoral students and postdocs will be the most attentive to (missing) detail(s). This occasion would give them a first chance to contribute to peer reviewing processes. You can simply direct them to our site, from which (after registering) they can navigate to your school's Collection page and offer reviews of manuscripts currently under evaluation.
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. Each individual lecture notes will appear in SciPost Physics Lecture Notes and receive their own DOI.
As organizers, optionally you could provide an introductory chapter to your school, as well as the traditional group photo. If provided, the introduction will be minted with its own DOI.
Besides the individual publications, we will also provide a book-format, single-file pdf of your introductory chapter plus all lecture notes of the school if requested by the organisers.
In collaboration with the ICTP we will make arrangements for printing of this single-file pdf into a physical book.