Scientific information service
Who we areSupporting Open Access Publishing
CERN is committed to Open Access and the Scientific Information Service implements the vision and policies of the Organization.
CERN’s vision is directly inspired to our establishing Convention which stipulates that "all results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available”. As a publicly and internationally funded research institution we believe everyone should get access to our results without any financial barrier. Open Access publishing is a tool to reach this objective. CERN recognizes the value journals add, at a cost, to scientific information, and is implementing a series of initiative to facilitate Open Access publishing in high-quality journals.
The most important tool to implement this vision is the SCOAP3 initiative, through which CERN and partners in over 20 countries are working to convert to Open Access existing high-quality High-Energy Physics journals. While waiting for the SCOAP3 initiative to be operational, and all High-Energy Physics literature to be available Open Access, CERN and leading publishers in the field (the American Physical Society, Elsevier, SISSA and Springer) have reached agreements to make the scientific publications from the LHC accelerator available Open Access and under a Creative Common license, thus complying with the publication policy of our Physics Department
In other fields, such as accelerator science, CERN contributes to Open Access by contributing to the sponsorship the Open Access journal Physical Review Special Topics Accelerators and Beams
In addition, CERN contributes to underwriting part of the running costs of arXiv, as well as building tools for open access to all this information such as INSPIRE. We also co-ordinated a consortium of libraries, publishers and funding agencies, SOAP, in a large-scale study to identify the demand and offer for Open Access and its main drivers and barriers.
These initiatives do not cover the entire spectrum of the literature produced at CERN. As signatories of COPE, we take further action to encourage a transition to Open Access publishing. In particular, recognizing that high-quality scientific publishing has a cost, and scientific journals play a key role in the quality-assurance process, the Scientific Information Service covers reasonable fees that some journals could charge in order to make research articles Open Access. This instrument is only available for articles published in Open Access journals that are entirely Open Access, and not for so called “ hybrid” journals, which sell subscriptions and make part of their content available Open Access: the CERN Library has already paid for those journals, so Open Access fees cannot be covered. These arrangements apply for research articles spontaneously submitted by members of personnel. Applying is easy: just contact the Scientific Information Service to discuss arrangements.