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CERN Publication Policy

Open Access and Copyright for the LHC publications

New guidelines have recently been issued for the publications from the Physics department, in particular those from the LHC Collaborations.

Consistent with the stated position of the Collaborations and the General Conditions applicable to Experiments at CERN, every effort will be made to publish papers under Open Access conditions, as defined by the SCOAP3 initiative. As at the date of this document, the Creative Commons Attribution ("cc by") license meets these conditions.

Papers will mention "Copyright CERN, for the benefit of the Collaboration". CERN will strive to exercise its copyright in such a way as to permit the widest possible dissemination and use of the paper. Every reasonable effort will be made to avoid transfer of copyright to a third party.

OA and CERN

OA at CERN has a long history, the CERN Convention of 1953 states:
"...the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available".
Since 1993 CERN has used an electronic system, developed in 1999 into the current CDS (CERN Document Server), to satisfy its mission of dissemination and long-term retention of research results.
The Operational Circular no. 6 (latest version approved in June 2001) requires every CERN author to submit a copy of their scientific documents to the CERN Document Server (CDS).
Today only 30% of the present article production is not available as OA on CDS and the library plans to recover the missing full-text in the near future.

OA statements of the LHC Collaborations

The LHC Collaborations have approved statements supporting Open Access publication:

  • ALICE, approved on 9th March 2007
  • ATLAS, approved February 23, 2007
  • CMS, approved on 2nd March 2007
  • LHCb, approved on 12th March 2007

Milestones of the CERN publication policy

  • November 2003
    A policy document was issued in order to reinforce the habit of self-archiving
  • May 2004
    CERN signs the Berlin Declaration and the Organization is actively committed to Open Access
  • March 2005
    CERN's Scientific Information Policy Board and Executive Board approved the new CERN policy on Open Access "Continuing CERN action on Open Access" summarized in the two followings points:
    • 1. to require its researchers to deposit a copy of all their published articles in an open access repository.
    • 2. to encourage its researchers to publish their research articles in open access journals.
  • March 2007
    Proposal to establish a Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3).