The European Physical Journal includes 12 journals, each dedicated to a specific area of physics. On Monday 8 August 2016, the first three articles dedicated to the NICA project, the MPD detector and the BM@N experiment were issued in the journal with the A index, “Hadrons and nuclei”.

The editorial Preface says that the purpose of this collection of theoretical articles is to define scientific problems and the potential of heavy ion collisions experiments that are planned to be implemented at NICA, where the highest densities of baryonic matter ever created in terrestrial laboratories will be provided. Joint efforts of leading scientists of the world are essential to understand this issue. In 2009, with this purpose professors D.Blaschke, A.Sorin and V.Toneev developed the electronic resource White paper (NICA White Paper, http://theor0.jinr.ru/twiki-cgi/view/NICA/WebHome) with the opportunity to publish and to discuss proposals.

The current issue of the European Physical Journal will include 56 articles; some of them have been already approved by experts and corrected, others are being prepared for online publication.

The introductory section contains five additional articles which discuss the three stages of construction of the NICA facility, the establishment of the MPD detector, the BM@N experiment for the study of baryonic matter, the simulation software for the experiments and study of spin physics at the SPD detector using polarized protons and deuterons. Therefore, this resource brings together key information about the NICA project. The issue of the White paper is the result of work of the editorial Board which includes experts from the USA, France, Germany, Poland and JINR under the leadership of D.Blaschke.

The editors thanked members of the JINR Programme Advisory Committee for Particle Physics who supported development of the White paper, in particular H.Gutbrod and I. Tserruya. In addition, a special note of thanks goes to V.Kekelidze, D.Khartseev, V.Matveev, A.Sorin, H.Stöcker and Nu Xu. Authors dedicate this work to the memory of academician A.N.Sissakian, the initiator of the implementation of the NICA project at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. The articles are available at http://epja.epj.org/component/epj/?task=topic.

Galina Myalkovskaya, JINR Weekly newspaper