An expanded collaboration agreement between CERN and the OAPEN Foundation sees the Laboratory directly hosting the OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books in its Data Centre

CERN and the not-for-profit organization OAPEN Foundation are happy to announce a further expansion of their collaboration to jointly promote open access to books.

Since 2021, CERN and OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) have collaborated to disseminate books that are made available in open access through SCOAP³ for Books, a collective open-access initiative hosted at CERN.

Building on this successful track record and the aligned values and goals, OAPEN and CERN have now signed an expanded collaboration agreement whereby, from 2024 onwards, CERN will use its extensive technical infrastructure to directly host both the OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) in its Data Centre, alongside its other scholarly communication services such as INSPIREhep and Zenodo.

This mutually beneficial arrangement will help increase the operational efficiency and reliability of OAPEN and DOAB as vital services for the research community spanning all scholarly disciplines. “For CERN, this further amplifies its existing efforts to support and promote open science,” says Alexander Kohls, Head of the CERN Scientific Information Service. “Utilising the CERN infrastructure will significantly increase stability for researchers worldwide allowing free and open access to the more than 30,000 books hosted in the OAPEN Library. Moreover, leveraging this infrastructure across multiple initiatives and disciplines ensures efficiency.”

Niels Stern, OAPEN Managing Director adds "We are excited about this new and unique agreement which shows the power of collaboration between two not-for-profit organisations committed to open science. The agreement will strengthen OAPEN and DOAB as essential open infrastructures for academic books, thus emphasising their reliability, scalability, and durability for researchers, publishers, libraries, and research funders."

Since the very beginning of both organisations, open research has been at the core of their respective missions. CERN has already successfully supported other communities in establishing or expanding open science principles and collaborates with organisations such as UNESCO, the European Commission, and NASA to further accelerate the global transition to open science. For more than a decade, OAPEN has operated three platforms dedicated to the dissemination and discovery of open-access, peer-reviewed books.