SwissUniversities, an organisation that represents the universities in Switzerland, is currently negotiating so-called Read and Publish deals with scholarly communication publishers. Such a deal combines a subscription component to access the content of journals (“Read”) and the possibility to publish articles Open Access in those journals (“Publish”). The CERN Library is a member of the Swiss Consortium of Academic Libraries, which works closely with SwissUniversities on these deals, and is participating in these negotiations for some publishers. This week, the negotiating team of SwissUniversities informed CERN that discussions with Springer Nature are not making progress, so negotiations have been stopped and the current agreement will not be renewed for 2020.

As CERN is a member of the Consortium, this means that CERN users might lose access to new content published by Springer Nature after 1 January 2020. The list of journals affected by this change is available here.

All content published before 2020, as well as all content published Open Access remains available, e.g. journals funded by SCOAP3: Journal of High Energy Physics and European Physical Journal C.

The CERN Library is committed to provide the content by other means, so if you need an article that is not available, please send an email to: library.desk@cern.ch. We will do our best to send you the article within a few hours.

In addition, SwissUniversities has put together a document that describes other ways of accessing content included in those journals. Please have a look at this fact sheet.

You’ll find the official communication from SwissUniversities here (we are only concerned by Springer Nature).

We will inform you as soon as the situation changes. The negotiations with Springer Nature will continue in 2020, to achieve a mutually acceptable agreement.

In the meantime, do not hesitate to contact us at: library.desk@cern.ch for any questions or concerns.