Scientific information service
Who we areCERN "Yellow Reports"
Quick links: [YR list on CDS] [Procedure for authors and editors] [Request a copy]
The CERN Report series (popularly known as Yellow Reports) was started in 1955. It provides a medium for communicating CERN-related work where publication in a journal is not appropriate.
The Yellow Report series includes the proceedings of schools and workshops having a large impact on the future of CERN, as well as reports on new activities which do not yet have a natural platform.
The series also includes reports on detectors and technical papers from individual CERN departments, again criteria being that the audience should be large and the duration of interest long. Documents relating to processes which could lead to patents are particularly appropriate since a departmental report does not give the necessary protection of intellectual property rights.
Yellow Reports have to be approved by the CERN Reports Editorial Board (CREB). The criteria used by the committee include a requirement of a strong and direct link to CERN, and a significant and lasting interest of the material to a broad community at CERN. In addition to stringent requirements on the scientific and technical content, the presentational quality must be of a high standard. Note that copies of transparencies are not normally accepted within CERN Reports. Proceedings that do not fulfill the criteria of a Yellow Report may be submitted for publication in the CERN-PROC series.
Yellow Reports are published in open access on the World Wide Web under the Creative Commons CC-BY-3.0 license. A small number of paper copies is printed; additional copies may be obtained by Print on Demand. Note that the material presented in a Yellow Report may not be published elsewhere. In particular, it may not be submitted to a journal or published as a book. It is, however, acceptable for contributions to CERN Reports to be made available as preprints, and submission to arXiv is encouraged. It must be indicated that the material has been submitted for publication in a CERN Yellow Report.
To increase the visibility of Yellow Reports, a table of contents will be sent to arXiv including links to the individual contributions. Authors are strongly encouraged to submit their contributions to arXiv and to re-upload the final version which will be sent to them by the editors upon approval. The appropriate way to reference publication in a Yellow Report will be communicated by the editors. Authors preferring not to submit their contributions themselves are kindly asked to grant permission to the CERN Scientific Information Service to submit on their behalf.
To improve citability a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) will be assigned to every Yellow Report and to every contribution.
Audience
The potential audience for a Yellow Report is mainly composed of physicists and postgraduate students (particularly those working in the field of particle physics) as well as engineers and computer scientists.
How to obtain them
All Yellow Reports are available electronically on the CERN Document Server. For Reports published from 2010 onwards, paper copies may be obtained via Print on Demand; an order form is available from the CDS record. For Reports published before 2010, some paper copies may still be available from the CERN Library.
Yellow Reports are also accessible through the INSPIRE database.
October 13, 2010