A revised version of the CERN Open Access Policy was approved by Director-General Fabiola Gianotti on 25 May 2021. The updated policy will help strengthen the Organization’s commitment to open science and ensure that the output of research from the laboratory is made publicly available
The CERN Open Access Policy – originally introduced in 2014 and last reviewed in 2017 – has facilitated significant progress towards the ultimate goal of publishing all of CERN’s research open access. Thanks to this policy, 93% of CERN scientific publications were openly accessible in 2020. This success is primarily attributable to the SCOAP3 initiative, a global, CERN-hosted collaboration of 3000 institutions that has enabled open access publishing of high-energy physics research in key journals. The recent Read and Publish agreements signed with five major publishers have further widened options for CERN authors to publish their research open access beyond high-energy physics publications.
The revised policy both reinforces CERN’s position on open access and clarifies it, in particular with regard to the default licence applied to each article, i.e. Creative Commons attribution licence (CC-BY-4.0), which enables maximum reuse of the research results while requiring that authors receive appropriate credit. Furthermore, the policy highlights the importance of the identification of CERN-affiliated corresponding authors for research articles to ensure their systematic open access publishing under Read and Publish agreements. Finally, the policy confirms that all CERN-affiliated authors are eligible to benefit from central funding to cover open access publishing fees.
The revised version of the policy is available here.
All the open access options available at CERN are presented on the Scientific Information Service website, and an interactive tool has been developed to help CERN authors find the best path towards open access.
Please send your questions about open access to this address : open-access-questions@cern.ch