The Living Reviews in European Governance (LREG) is a joint winner of the European Information Association’s 2009 Awards for European Information Sources.

The European Information Association (EIA) is a non-profit organisation with charitable status, registered in the United Kingdom. It serves as a focus of expertise on EU information.

The Awards highlight products that are considered to be excellent in the provision of EU information and recognise the Living Reviews in European Governance as the best of a large number of publications and online services. Previous winners include: Eurostat website, PreLex, Council of the EU website, Celex on the web, the American Chamber of Commerce to the EU’s Guide to EU Consumer Affairs.

This year’s winners of the Awards were formally announced on 11 May 2009 at the EIA annual meeting at the European Parliament office, London.

The prize will encourage us to follow up our endeavor to publish state-of-the-art review articles on core themes relating to European integration research, freely available on the internet!

Gerda Falkner (Editor-in-Chief)
Michael Nentwich (Technical Director)
and Patrick Scherhaufer (Managing Editor)

[press release in German]

Due to maintenance work, the Living Reviews server will be down from 8 May 2009, 8pm CET to 9 May 2009, 1am CET. All journals will be offline during these hours

We apologize for any inconvenience.

A short interview on the journal Living Reviews in Relativity with editor-in-chief Bernard Schutz has been published by Andreas Trunschke on his Weblog Forschung in Brandenburg.

Prof. Schutz explains the concept of a scientific review and highlights the advantage of regularly updated online articles for researchers. The interview (Nr. 19) is part of a blog post introducing the work of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute).

We would like to draw your attention to a new electronic journal on low-frequency gravitational waves science. In cooperation with the Digital Editions group of the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL), GW Notes is published by the MPI for Gravitational Physics (AEI).

What:

The e-journal, GW Notes, has been born from the need for a journal where the distinct communities involved in gravitation wave research might gather. While these three communities – Astrophysics, General Relativity and Data Analysis – have made significant collaborative progress over recent years, we believe that it is indispensable to future advancement that they draw closer, and that they speak a common idiom.

Why:

The electronic publishing service arXiv is a dynamic, well-respected source of news of recent work and is updated daily. But, perhaps due to the large volume of new work submitted, it is probable that a member of our community might easily overlook relevant material. This new e-journal proposes to offer scientists of the Gravitational Wave community the opportunity to more easily follow advances in the three areas mentioned: Astrophysics, General Relativity and Data Analysis.

How:

We hope to achieve this by selecting the most significant e-prints and list them in abstract form with a link to the full paper in both a single e-journal (GW Notes) and a blog (LISA Brownbag).

Whenever you see an interesting paper on GW science and LISA, you can submit the arXiv number to our submission page:

http://brownbag.lisascience.org/

This is straightforward:
No registration is required (although recommended, see ahead) to simply type in the number in the entry field of the page, indicate some keywords and submit. Don’t expect it to be immediately displayed in the blog. The submission will be reviewed to check it suits the blog.

You can register here:

http://lists.aei.mpg.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lisa_brownbag

Note:

Of course, this also implies that the paper will have its impact increased, since it will reach a broader public, so that we encourage you to not forget submitting your own work.

In addition to the abstracts, in each PDF issue of GW Notes (released quarterly), we will offer you a previously unpublished article written by a senior researcher in one of these three domains, which addresses the interests of all readers:

http://brownbag.lisascience.org/lisa-gw-notes/

Bernard Schutz and Pau Amaro-Seoane
Editors

The Living Reviews in Democracy (LRD) is now online. It is a new member of the family of Living Reviews journals. One of the most important features of the LRD is that its articles are updated regularly by the authors; this is the significance of the word ‘living’ in the title. Web-based and peer-reviewed, the LRD publishes reviews of research on core themes relating to democracy. Articles are solicited by an international editorial board from scientists who are experts in their fields. They provide critical outlines of the state of the art in the subjects covered and offer annotated insights (and where possible, active links) into the key literature. The goal of the journal is to develop its articles into a carefully screened and edited, well-integrated, topical set of hypertext documents that, taken together, form a valuable research tool for scholars of democracy.

LRD is part of the global Open Access movement for free, immediate, and permanent online access to knowledge and research results. The journal is published by the Center for Comparative and International Studies at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich in the framework of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research “Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century”. The Editor-in-Chief is Prof. Dr. Frank Schimmelfennig.

The concept of Living Reviews journals was developed by institutes of the Max Planck Society, which pioneered the Living Reviews in Relativity (LRR) and the Living Reviews in Solar Physics (LRSP). Living Reviews in Relativity has already been online for ten years and became one of the primary resources in gravitational physics. Since 2007, the Living Reviews in Landscape Research (LRLR) is published by the ZALF, an institute of the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft. The journal family is now affiliated with the Max Planck Digital Library, which provides technical infrastructure and software support.

LRD is the second Living Reviews journal in the social sciences, besides the recently launched Living Reviews in European Governance (LREG), which is published by the European Community Studies Association Austria.

Press release (PDF): en | de

A public lecture in the Living Reviews in Relativity Anniversary Lectures Series. We are celebrating our 10th year online with a number of colloquia by distinguished authors in the Berlin/Potsdam area.

Date:
March 11, 2009 – 14:00

Place:
Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute), Lecture Hall, Am Mühlenberg 1, 14476 Potsdam-Golm (map)

Abstract:
It is well known that the description of the non-gravitational interactions (electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces) relies on finite-dimensional Lie groups and algebras (e.g., SU(3)X SU(2)X U(1)). Recently, it has been argued by many research teams that the description of the gravitational interaction should involve infinite-dimensional Lie algebras of hyperbolic Kac-Moody type, such as E(10). The talk will provide a brief, pedagogical introduction to these mathematical structures and present some of the evidence for their relevance to gravity.

RSS Feed:
LRR Lecture Series

A public lecture in the Living Reviews in Relativity Anniversary Lectures Series. We are celebrating our 10th year online with a number of colloquia by distinguished authors in the Berlin/Potsdam area.

Date:
November 13, 2008 – 18:00

Place:
Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW), Akademiegebäude am Gendarmenmarkt, Einstein-Saal, Jägerstraße 22/23, 10117 Berlin (map)

Abstract:
In general relativity, it is meaningless to ask what happened before the big bang because this is the moment when time itself came into existence. How the initial state arose that set up the expanding universe, or what exactly happened at that initial time are questions which cannot be answered by general relativity. In this theory, the big bang appears as a mathematical singularity: a time when the dynamical equations for a changing universe break down. Only by extending the theory by equations which do not break down can we reliably see what the earliest stages of the universe may have looked like. A commonly expected extension is to combine general relativity with quantum features. Cosmological models analyzed in this context show the emergence of repulsive forces in a small and dense universe, which prevent the formation of a singularity. Instead, the universe did have a pre-history prior to the big bang where the universe collapsed before bouncing into the expanding phase we see now. Detailed mathematical derivations combined with sensitive observations may some day allow us to obtain glimpses of our universe at and before the big bang.

RSS Feed:
LRR Lecture Series

A public lecture in the Living Reviews in Relativity Anniversary Lectures Series. We are celebrating our 10th year online with a number of colloquia by distinguished authors in the Berlin/Potsdam area.

Date:
November 6, 2008 – 17:30

Place:
Universität Potsdam, Campus Golm, Institut für Physik und Astronomie (Haus 28), Raum 0.104 (map)

Abstract:
Gravitational waves are a firm prediction of Einstein’s general relativity theory. Ripples of the fabric of space-time propagating with the speed of light, they have already been indirectly verified in astronomy by observing the motion of the binary pulsar PSR 1913+16 around its companion. Detailed analysis show that this system is losing energy at exactly the right amount as predicted for gravitational radiation.

A huge world-wide experimental effort is currently aiming at detecting gravitational waves directly on Earth (ground-based detectors LIGO, VIRGO and GEO, and space-based one LISA). The most powerful waves are expected to be produced by systems of neutron stars or black holes when they collide together and merge. Gravitational waves should also be produced in the early Universe. A wealth of astrophysical information concerning the sources of these waves will be contained in the gravitational wave signals. Even cosmological information on the expansion and constituents of the Universe at large scales could be obtained from observations by all these detectors.

However, to be able to extract all this potential information, theorists must work hard to predict the details of gravitational wave signals with high precision. Approximation methods in general relativity have been developed that go deep inside Einstein’s gravity by including new effects impossible to detect by means other than gravitational waves. Numerical relativity too has succeeded in providing excellent predictions for the signals. Gravitational wave experiments and theory go hand in hand to probe the gravitational Universe and also to test Einstein’s gravity theory.

RSS Feed:
LRR Lecture Series

LRLR is now listed by CAB International in CAB Abstracts. ISI Web of Knowledge also includes LRLR to those customers who cover CAB Abstracts by their ISI licence.

The Living Reviews journal project will be present with an information stand at the Berlin Open Access Days on October 9 and 10, 2008.

The Open Access Days (OAD) were launched by the operators of the information platform open-access.net in order to give scientists an opportunity to obtain on-the-spot information about Open Access (OA) and to enhance the activities of the OA community.

Conference and Exhibition Venue: Freie Universitaet Berlin Habelschwerdter Allee 45 D-14195 Berlin