CERN has signed the Registry of Institutional OA Self-Archiving Policies. Here's how Jens Vigen, the CERN Scientific Information Officer, described CERN's policy for the registry: 'The recommendation from the Berlin 3 meeting, held in Southampton in March 2005, on how the Berlin Declaration should be put in place is fully inline with the CERN policy that was actually presented at the same meeting: "(1) implement a policy to require their researchers to deposit a copy of all their published articles in an open access repository and (2) encourage their researchers to publish their research articles in open access journals where a suitable journal exists and provide the supportto enable that to happen." Point 1 has been the official position of CERN since November 2003 (Annex 1). Point 2 is the official position of CERN as of March 2005 (Annex 2). The full policy is described in the document CERN-OPEN-2005-006 [temporarily here], shortly available from [the CDS server].' CERN is the world's largest particle physics lab.
(PS: This is not only very welcome news for OA to physics literature and the momentum coming out of the Berlin3 meeting. It's also a nice kind of homecoming. Tim Berners-Lee developed the first web client and server at CERN in 1990, and in 1991 he and CERN released the technology for the free use of all, essentially launching the WWW as we know it --without which, OA would either be an idle dream today or float on a very different infrastructure.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/24/2005 02:49:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
