CREATES HISTORY

orld Scientific is the first publisher in Asia Pacific to form a consortium with more than 100 academic universities in China, thus facilitating Chinese researchers' access to journals online at an affordable price.

Dr K K Phua, World Scientific's Chairman and Prof. Xue Fangyu, Director of Tsinghua University Library which was responsible for bringing together the consortium of libraries, inked the agreement on 18 February. Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Acting Minister for Education, kindly officiated at the event that commemorated the formation of the WorldSciNet - China Consortium. His Excellency Zhang Jiuhuan, Ambassador of the People's Republic of China to Singapore, also witnessed the signing ceremony.

Said Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam: "The formation of this Consortium is one of many such international linkages that are springing up between Chinese universities and the global academic community. Even as international institutions seek greater access to the wealth of ideas and expertise in China, so, too, Chinese institutions are looking outwards to seek new partners in knowledge creation.

"This is part of the worldwide trend among leading universities to stay relevant to an increasingly globalized economic community. All over the world, leading universities are looking beyond their own country and traditional areas of focus."

Over the past year, World Scientific has indeed been actively promoting its electronic journals to the Chinese academic libraries and overcame longstanding connectivity problem with the Mainland. For a start, 58 of World Scientific's electronic journals covering various disciplines will be made available to the group of Chinese universities. The international publisher hopes to make available the entire collection to the whole of China by next year. This will soon be followed by the provision of all of the 90 journals that it publishes.

ot on the heels of bagging the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics, Professor VL Ginzburg is working with World Scientific again - this time on the second edition of his book, Superconductivity.

Prof Ginzburg became a Nobel Laureate for his pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids. He shared the award with Professor Alexi Abrikosov and Professor Anthony Leggett, both from Illinois, USA.

The former Head of the Theory Group at P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow, Russia, joined hands with his colleague Professor E A Andryushin to publish the first edition of the book with World Scientific in 1994. Written in a lively and nontechnical style, the book takes readers from the discovery and physical natural phenomenon of superconductivity to its applications and wide adoption during the boom period. It makes ideal background reading for any school or college-level study of the field.

And Prof Ginzburg is certainly not the only World Scientific author who has won a Nobel Prize. Among others are Glenn T Seaborg (1951 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry), C N Yang (1957 Nobel Laureate in Physics), Philip Anderson (1977 Nobel Laureate in Physics), Ilya Prigogine (1977 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry), Martinus Veltman (1999 Nobel Laureate in Physics) and Ahmed Zewail (1999 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry).

World Scientific's recent book The Iraq War and its Consequences is another testimony to the publishing house's close affiliations with Nobel Laureates. It features more than 30 essays by Nobel Peace Laureates and eminent scholars.

Besides, the Nobel Foundation granted World Scientific the rights to bring the series up to date from 1971 in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine and Peace; and from 1968 in Literature. The series also includes the lectures of the winners of the Sveriges Riksbank (Bank of Sweden) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel from 1969 onwards.