Making research open and accessible to all is one of CERN’s basic values. In order to guarantee a bright future based on openness and cooperation at CERN, a new strategy has been created that integrates already-existing open scientific activities.
The CERN Council established a new open science policy for the organisation with immediate effect during its 209th Session in September. The goal of the strategy is to make all CERN research completely open, inclusive, democratic, and transparent for other researchers as well as for the general public. The Open Science Strategy Working Group (OSSWG), which has representatives from each CERN department, created it. The working group created thorough recommendations for the CERN community on sharing its results within a new framework for open science, drawing on already-existing bottom-up efforts. A webpage dedicated to detailing all the open scientific projects at CERN is published together with the policy statement.
The finalised policy was developed in response to the European Strategy for Particle Physics’ 2020 update, which emphasised the value of open science, and the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, which was released in 2021. Since the CERN Convention was ratified at UNESCO in 1952, open science has been one of the organization’s guiding principles. As a result, CERN efforts have consistently worked to increase access to and transparency about research for the benefit of both science and society.
All research publications, experimental data, and research software and hardware are made publicly available under the new policy, which also incorporates the previous rules for open access, open data, and open source software and hardware. Additionally, it combines other open science tenets such as training, outreach, and citizen science, which aim to inform and engage the public and the next generation of researchers. These tenets make research reliable and reproducible as well as research integrity, open infrastructure, and research assessment.
A new era of knowledge sharing is ushered in by CERN’s new Open Science Policy. The OSSWG will keep evaluating how open science functions at CERN and revise the policy in light of fresh findings. Along with this, CERN will continue to support the programme by releasing a new open science report each year.
“The new Open Science Policy reflects the values embodied by CERN and high-energy physics, as implied also by the CERN Convention: openly sharing with the science community and society not only the results of our research, but also the tools and innovation developed for and needed by our activity,” said Michelangelo Mangano, senior theoretical physicist, member of the OSSWG, and chair of the Scientific Information Policy Board.
