Geneva, 18 September 2014. The American Physical Society (APS) and The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN1) jointly announce a partnership to make all CERN-authored articles published in the APS journal collection to be Open Access. Articles in APS' Physical Review Letters, Physical Review D, and Physical Review C in 2015 and 2016 will be covered by this agreement. All physics results from CERN will benefit from this partnership, in theoretical physics and experimental physics, at the LHC accelerator as well as other experimental programmes.
“CERN is a long-time supporter of APS journals, and is committed to Open Access. This collaboration is a very important step towards global Open Access for a global discipline,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer.
Although APS is not participating in the current cycle of SCOAP3, the global Open Access initiative in physics coordinated by CERN, this agreement demonstrates both organizations’ commitment to Open Access publishing.
“It was important to continue our discussions with CERN, while keeping in mind the financial stability of the APS publishing programme,” said Mac Beasley, 2014 APS President. “This is a fitting solution that advances physics.”
Thanks to this partnership, articles will be available free of charge for everyone to read. Copyright will remain with the authors and permissive Creative Commons CC-BY licences will allow re-use of the information (e.g. in books, review articles, conference proceedings and teaching material) as well as text- and data-mining applications.
CERN and APS have been cooperating for a long time to support APS’s pioneering Open Access journal Physical Review Special Topics Accelerator and Beams that publishes articles on topics of technical innovation at CERN and elsewhere. APS and CERN are committed to continue to work together to find new ways to collaborate to provide for the widest dissemination of physics results through global Open Access initiatives.
The American Physical Society is a non-profit membership organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through its outstanding research journals, scientific meetings, and education, outreach, advocacy and international activities. APS represents 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry in the United States and throughout the world. Society offices are located in College Park, MD (Headquarters), Ridge, NY, and Washington, DC.
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, operates the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. Founded in 1954, CERN has become a prime example of international collaboration, with 21 Member States as of January 2014. Additional nations from around the globe also contribute to and participate in the research programmes. CERN operates the global SCOAP3 partnership, a consortium of over 2000 libraries, research organizations and funding agencies in over 36 countries, which has converted to Open Access 10 journals in High-Energy Physics. The CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco–Swiss border near Geneva. Its flagship research facility, the Large Hadron Collider, is housed in a 27-kilometre tunnel under the plain between Lake Geneva and the Jura mountains.
1. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. Its headquarters are in Geneva. Its Member States are currently: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a Candidate for Accession and Serbia is an Associate Member State in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.