Support the Open Access Movement
CERN's Executive Board recently endorsed a new policy of open access to the laboratory's results: Continuing CERN action on Open Access (OA) [http://cds.cern.ch/record/828991/files/open-2005-006.pdf]. What does this policy mean for you?
CERN authors have two responsibilities:
- Submit your document to the CERN Document Server;
- Consider submitting future articles to an Open Access journal.
Since 2001, Operational Circular No. 6 has required every CERN author (Staff member, Fellow, or any Associated member of personnel who is allowed to use CERN as his affiliation) to submit a copy of their scientific documents to the CERN Document Server (CDS). For some groups all approved documents are submitted by the secretary (see the Departments' policies at: http://library.cern.ch/cern_publications/cern_publication_policy.html). Each author should personally also ensure the submission of any other articles which are not added in this way, such as conference contributions and review articles. It is not sufficient to rely on the published version eventually reaching the library �" we are still missing many past documents and copyright restrictions can prevent us from making a copy available even to other CERN users. Familiarise yourself, if you are not already, with your own department's policy and if your articles are not dealt with by the official route, submit them yourself...
To submit an article to CDS go to any computer at CERN and follow these simple steps:
- Go to CDS [http://cdsweb.cern.ch/].
- Log in. If you do not already have a CDS login, click the login link to set one up.
- Click on the button ‘Submit'; choose CERN Open Document and follow the instructions entering the relevant details for your document.
Wait a few minutes and you will be able to search CDS using your name to bring up a list of your own work, and you can even use these records to generate your own web page of publications. If you would like assistance, ask at the library. And if you already maintain a web page or database of your group's publications, then get in touch as we can try to automate the download.
Once you have submitted your documents, your work will be visible to anyone in the world (including other databases who harvest records from our database). The minutes spent registering each document will also guarantee the long-term archiving of your work.
You can submit your own copy of a paper either before or after peer-review (usually called a preprint), and most publishers now allow you to submit a copy of their published version (called the postprint) to your institutional archive (that is CDS). We recommend that you submit at least the published version but you can submit both if you prefer to have a complete record.
There is no time limit so you can submit your older documents. If you would also like to submit PowerPoint files, photos or other documents, please get in touch with the library to arrange this.
The second step of the OA policy encourages you to consider publishing in an OA journal. These journals provide permanent free access to your article, and this has been shown to improve citation ratings. We maintain a list of titles for your consideration at www.cern.ch/oa/journals.html. At the moment this list is short, but CERN is investigating active measures to increase it - more news on this later.
Conference organizers are also encouraged to consider OA publication of proceedings. This is much easier �" there are several services devoted to publishing OA proceedings (IOP's Journal of Physics Conference Series; Proceedings of Science (evolved from JHEP); JACoW, which is the accelerator community's example of best practise). The two former also offer printed copies. If you choose a more traditional publisher, ask them to make the online proceedings available for free and to allow you to also deposit the papers in an OA repository �" common experience is that they will be happy to agree.
Keep up to date with CERN's policy on Open Access by reading the Bulletin and visiting our OA page from time to time:
La version française de cet article sera publiée dans le prochain bulletin.