Les Houches Summer School Lecture Notes

General information for school organizers and lecturers

Publishing setup

• Each individual school's lecture notes are to 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.

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.

Setting things up for your school

To set things up, we simply need the following from you:

• The title of your session;
• The list of organizers;
• The list of lecturers (at least those from which you expect contributions);
• A description of the school (at most 3 or 4 paragraphs);
• Following the Les Houche School's tradition, a nice individual portrait of each lecturer (for use in the final publication);
• Any further image(s) you want displayed on the web page.

You should provide our editorial administration edadmin@scipost.org with this information as early as possible, and at the very latest a few weeks before you expect the first submissions to come in (the portraits can be provided later, in any case before final publication).

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.

Authoring information

Your school's lecturers should prepare their lecture notes following the authoring instructions for SciPost Physics Lecture Notes, which you will find at this link.

Upon submission, mention should be made that the manuscript is destined for the Les Houches Summer School Lecture Notes Series. If the paper is first put on arXiv, then the Comments field should mention Submitted to SciPost Physics Lecture Notes, Les Houches Summer School Series.

Editorial process

The editorial processing of submissions will follow the general procedures standardly 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 a special provision for the Les Houches Series, following on the long-established tradition, a portrait of each individual lecturer will be included in the relevant publication.

As organizers, we will ask you to provide an introductory chapter to your school, as well as the traditional group photo. This 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.

In collaboration with the Les Houches School, we will make arrangements for printing of this single-file pdf into a physical book. We will organize an initial print run to cover the needs of the school and its participants. To cover more general and future needs, we will make further arrangements for a perpetually accessible print-on-demand service.