About the Journal

Focus and Scope

CERN is a scientific laboratory whose main purpose is fundamental research in High-Energy Physics (HEP). An important task of the Organization is to communicate its work, discoveries, and achievements, also via publications in books, journals, and proceedings of conferences, in paper and/or electronic form.

The CERN Yellow Reports series was started in 1955. It provides a medium for communicating CERN-related work where publication in a journal is not appropriate. It includes proceedings of conferences, schools and workshops having a large impact on the future of CERN, as well as reports on new activities which do not yet have a natural platform.

In 2017 the existing CERN Yellow Report series have been re-organized into three new ones: CERN Yellow Reports: School Proceedings, CERN Yellow Reports: Conference Proceedings and CERN Yellow Reports: Monographs, to better accomodate different types of content they publish.

Peer Review Process

The CERN Reports Editorial Board reports to the Scientific Information Policy Board and is responsible for the oversight of issues related to the CERN Yellow Reports. As documented below, it is responsible for approving individual Reports in a two-step process: approval in principle (i.e. deciding if the subject matter is in-principle appropriate for publication in a CERN Yellow Report); and final approval (i.e. confirming that the completed document is acceptable for publication and printing).

Responsibility for detailed checking of the contents is generally delegated to the Editor of each individual report who is required to confirm that the document is ready for printing (so-called "bon à tirer" in French).


The membership of the Board comes from different areas of CERN that are involved in providing content for and/or for production of the CERN Yellow Reports. This includes experimental and theoretical high-energy physics, accelerator physics and engineering, as well as information technologies and publishing.

The membership of the committee is as follows:

  • Carlos Lourenço, chairman of the CREB, Physics Department (Experimental Physics)
  • Gian Francesco Giudice, Physics Department (Theoretical Physics)
  • Alexander Kohls, Scientific Information Service
  • Tim Smith, Information Technology Department
  • Frank Zimmermann, Beams Department
  • Jens Vigen, Publisher for the CERN Yellow Reports

Open Access Policy

Knowledge transfer is an integral part of CERN’s mission. Moreover CERN has recently developed an Open Access Policy for its publications.

Therefore CERN Yellow Reports are published in Open Access under the Creative Commons CC-BY-4.0 Attribution License.

Indexing and Databases

All CERN Yellow Reports are indexed in the CERN Document Server and in INSPIRE.

The proceedings of the CERN Schools, proceedings and workshops are also indexed in Scopus, starting from 2005.

In order to increase the visibility of the CERN Yellow Reports, a table of contents of each issue, including links to the individual contributions, is sent to the electronic archive and distribution server arXiv.

Authors are therefore strongly encouraged to submit their contributions to arXiv and to re-upload the final version which will be sent to them by the editors upon approval. The appropriate way to reference publication in a Yellow Report will be communicated by the editors.

Authors preferring not to submit their contributions to arXiv themselves are kindly asked to grant permission to the CERN Scientific Information Service to submit on their behalf.

Audience

The potential audience for a CERN Yellow Report is mainly composed of physicists and post-graduate students (particularly those working in the field of particle physics) as well as engineers and computer scientists.

Some reports, e.g. Historical Reports, may be of interest to a larger and less specialized community.

Re-use of articles policy

The CERN Yellow Reports series is published in Open Access under the Creative Commons CC-BY-4.0 Attribution Licence.

Anyone can therefore re-use the published material provided that the report in which it has been published is correctly acknowledged as a source.

How to obtain CERN Yellow Reports

All CERN Yellow Reports are published online in full colour on this site and on the CERN Document Server.

If you want a paper copy of an already published Report please contact the CERN Library, where paper copies might still be available.

Sponsors

This series is sponsored by

Sources of Support

This series is supported by

Journal History

CERN is a scientific laboratory whose main purpose is fundamental research in High-Energy Physics (HEP). An important task of the Organization is to communicate its work, discoveries, and achievements, also via publications in books, journals, and proceedings of conferences, in paper and/or electronic form.

The CERN Yellow Reports Series was started in 1955. It provides a medium for communicating CERN-related work where publication in a journal is not appropriate.

The CERN Yellow Reports series includes the proceedings of conferences, schools and workshops having a large impact on the future of CERN, as well as reports on new activities which do not yet have a natural platform.

The series also includes reports on detectors and technical papers from individual CERN departments, again criteria being that the audience should be large and the duration of interest long.

Documents relating to processes which could lead to patents are particularly appropriate since a departmental report does not give the necessary protection of intellectual property rights.