The CERN Open Access policy requires that all peer-reviewed primary research articles from CERN authors are published open access (OA). The CERN Scientific Information Service (SIS) has enabled a range of mechanisms to offer CERN authors a large offer to comply with the policy.

The most important of these mechanisms is SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics), which has arranged for automatic OA to research in high-energy physics, published in 11 of the leading journals in the discipline. CERN SIS is also supporting other collective models, with no fees for readers or authors, such as Physical Review Accelerator and Beams published by APS, the Subscribe to Open model for the Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science, and the SciPost journals.

To ensure that the wide range of disciplines and needs of CERN researchers are supported, SIS has secured agreements with major scientific publishers (AIP, APS, Elsevier, Frontiers, IEEE, IOP, MDPI, Springer, Wiley). These agreements provide automatic Open Access publishing for articles submitted by CERN corresponding authors, while providing readers at CERN with access to the publishers’ content still under paywall. 

In 2023, SIS started three new similar agreements covering the portfolio of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Digital Library, ACS (American Chemical Society) and Nature Research Journals. This brings the total number of agreements to 12, collectively covering more than 4,000 journals. In 2023, the agreement with IOP was renewed with an extended scope, including more journals and articles. 

Finally, in certain cases, CERN SIS will cover the costs for OA publishing of articles that are not covered by the existing mechanisms. To be considered eligible, authors must contact SIS prior to submission to journals. It is important to note that articles submitted to journals with extraordinarily high APCs (in excess of CHF 4000) will not be funded by CERN. However, an exceptional mechanism is in place for articles to be published in high-profile journals (i.e. Nature, Nature Physics, Science Advances, etc.) and that are likely to receive a high public attention. In these cases, a detailed justification must be submitted to SIS for review and approval by the Director of Research and Computing, prior to journal submission.

Additional Information about Open Access mechanisms at CERN is available through the CERN SIS website. CERN SIS also provides an Interactive Author Guide, in order to help CERN authors to navigate across the open-access options.

For any question, please send email to open-access-questions@cern.ch or contact us on Mattermost.