AMSTERDAM and GENEVA, April 2, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --

CERN and Elsevier have announced that articles published by CERN authors in Elsevier Physics journals that are not covered by the SCOAP3 Open Access initiative will be published open access.

Thanks to this agreement, CERN results in fields such as nuclear physics, instrumentation, astroparticle physics and scientific computing will appear as open access articles, with copyright retained by CERN and its authors, and reuse determined by Creative Commons CC-BY licenses. This allows CERN to progress further towards its stated target of 100% 'gold' open access for all of its physics results as of 2015.

This new agreement covers all articles with at least one author affiliated to CERN, published in 2015 and 2016 in the Elsevier journals: Nuclear Instruments and Methods A, Nuclear Physics A, Physics of the Dark Universe and SoftwareX. These conditions have also been retroactively extended to eligible articles that were published in 2014 in the same journals.

CERN and Elsevier, together with a consortium of thousands of libraries from all over the world, are already successfully cooperating in the SCOAP3 initiative, a separate agreement that has converted important scientific journals such as Elsevier's Physics Letters B and Nuclear Physics B to open access journals at no cost for any author worldwide.

Gigi Rolandi, Senior Physicist at CERN, and head of the CERN Scientific Information Policy Board commented, "This agreement is important for the CERN scientific community. After the successful transition of our high-energy physics results to open access, our scientists and collaborations are also now able to fully benefit from open access conditions, at no direct cost, for nuclear physics and astroparticle physics results and for our complementary research activity in instrumentation and scientific computing."

Charon Duermeijer, Physics Publishing Director in Elsevier says, "I am excited that our close working relationship over recent years has now resulted in further strengthening our ties. I am already looking forward to new connections!"

About CERN

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a Candidate for Accession. Serbia is an Associate Member in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Union, JINR and UNESCO have Observer Status.

CERN operates the global SCOAP3 partnership, a consortium of over 2500 libraries, research organizations and funding agencies in over 44 countries, which has converted to Open Access 10 journals in High-Energy Physics.

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading provider of information solutions that enhance the performance of science, health, and technology professionals, empowering them to make better decisions, deliver better care, and sometimes make ground-breaking discoveries that advance the boundaries of knowledge and human progress. Elsevier provides web-based, digital solutions - among them ScienceDirect, Scopus, Elsevier Research Intelligence and ClinicalKey - and publishes over 2,500 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and more than 33,000 book titles, including a number of iconic reference works. Elsevier is part of RELX Group plc, a world-leading provider of information solutions for professional customers across industries.

Media contacts
CERN Press Office
+41-22-767-34-32
+41-22-767-21-41
press.office@cern.ch
http://www.cern.ch/press

Harald Boersma
Director Corporate Relations Elsevier
+31-20-485-27-36
h.boersma@elsevier.com

SOURCE Elsevier