CERN’s open-access (OA) share in scientific information gains more ground this year as the Organization signed a notable ‘publish and read’ agreement with IOP Publishing. In practice, this means that all research articles by corresponding authors with a primary or secondary affiliation to CERN, including articles from any experimental collaboration hosted by CERN, can now be published immediately in IOPP journals with no barriers and no article publication charges (APCs), under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). Moreover, the CERN community now has access to all the content in all 121 IOP Journals like the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics or the Journal of Instrumentation, including the oldest articles.

“The research community at CERN has been at the forefront of developments in scholarly communication – even dating prior to the founding of the world-wide web – reflecting our belief that openness is imperative to the progress of science,” said Alex Kohls, Group Leader Scientific Information Service at CERN. “Since 2014, the SCOAP3 initiative has established immediate open access to published articles as the standard in particle physics, but CERN authors publish also non-HEP content. Therefore, our agreement with IOP Publishing represents another important milestone in our open-access strategy.”

Among the roughly 1000 CERN articles published per year in journals, 60% are covered by SCOAP3 and 30% are OA in some other way. The IOPP agreement increases this share and mainly simplifies the publishing process for the authors and grants reading access to considerable resources of scientific knowledge. IOPP also publishes the CERN Courier, CERN’s magazine dedicated to the international high-energy physics community.

CERN’s Scientific Information Service needs to be informed before submissions of articles from CERN-affiliated collaborations or from CERN authors whose corresponding author is not affiliated with CERN, and which are also covered by this agreement.

Send your inquiries to open-access-questions@cern.ch.

More practical details can be found on the IOPP website.