The CERN Library is a member of the Swiss Consortium of Academic Libraries, which works closely with SwissUniversities to negotiate agreements with scholarly publishers on behalf of universities and research institutions in Switzerland, and includes CERN in some of these negotiations.

Recently, the negotiating team of SwissUniversities informed CERN that discussions with Elsevier are not making progress and there is a high risk that no agreement will be reached by January 2024, when our current agreement will expire.

The agreement with Elsevier includes two components: the subscription component to access the content of their journals (“Read”), and the Open Access publishing of articles from participating institutions’ authors in the journals (“Publish”)

As a consequence, CERN users may lose access to new content published by Elsevier after January 1st, 2024.  All content published before 2024, as well as all content published Open Access remains available, e.g. journals funded by SCOAP3: Nuclear Physics B and Physics Letters B. The CERN Library is committed to provide the content by other means, so if you need an article that is not available, please fill this form. We will do our best to send you the article within 24 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.

The systematic Open Access publishing of CERN articles in Elsevier journals (outside of Nuclear Physics B and Physics Letters B) enabled through our current agreement will cease on January 1st, 2024. This means that articles accepted in Elsevier journals after this date will not automatically be published Open Access supported by the central fund of the CERN library.

However, CERN authors and collaborations are required to comply with the CERN Open Access policy. Please note that CERN has valid Open Access agreements with many other publishers, you can find the list here. If you have an article already submitted or about to be submitted in one of the Elsevier journals, please reach out to us for advice.

We will inform you as soon as the situation changes. The negotiations with Elsevier will continue in 2024, to hopefully achieve a mutually acceptable agreement.

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