Open science collaboration at CERN

Transparency and collaboration have always been a cornerstone of CERN’s mission and in 2023 CERN’s Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) was created to act as a key enabler of CERN’s Open Science Policy. Its role is to provide support to the CERN community about open-source software and hardware, as a core component of open science, but also engage with interested external partners to use open science to drive scientific and technological progress.

“Since its inception, CERN’s OSPO, working closely with the Knowledge Transfer group, has supported an evolving CERN-wide commitment to transparency, accessibility, and the reuse of scientific knowledge for the common good. In 2025, we continued to coordinate the Laboratory’s internal activities in open-source hardware and software, while strengthening partnerships with other institutes”, explains Giacomo Tenaglia, the OSPO chair.

For example, in October 2025, CERN signed a collaboration agreement with the German Centre for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS) a promising partnership enabling each party to take advantage of the other’s expertise by leveraging CERN’s longstanding experience in open science and ZenDiS’s expertise in sovereign IT solutions for public administration.

“Together, we are strengthening Europe’s ability to develop and operate a sovereign digital infrastructure, while fostering knowledge exchange between the scientific community and public administration”, commented Leonhard Kugler from ZenDiS.

The aim of the agreement is to explore opportunities for including CERN’s rich catalogue of open-source software in the openCode catalogue (a platform used by the German public sector which enables collaborative software development and sharing). This agreement complements CERN’s ongoing partnership with the Sovereign Tech Agency.

Another significant initiative launched in 2025 was the OSPO-led collaboration with Software Heritage to better quantify the impact of CERN’s contribution to open source. This is hard to trace and identify but by tracking CERN-linked email addresses, this project aims to assess the role of scientists affiliated to CERN, thereby getting an overview of the open-source contributions that can be attributed to CERN.

2025 also saw the release of CERN’s inaugural report on open science which highlights the initiatives undertaken to give open access to CERN publications, data from the LHC experiments as well as software and hardware. The development of a software catalogue is being undertaken by the OSPO to highlight software with a strong potential for external reuse, building on the success of the existing open hardware catalogue.The report also explains how important Citizen science and international outreach are as part of CERN’s strategy to share scientific knowledge widely.

These achievements lay strong foundations for the next phase of CERN’s open science policy implementation which is led by the fundamental belief that it is CERN’s responsibility to give access to scientific findings to benefit science, education and society.

You can see the current members of the OSPO here. 

CERN technical contacts: Noemi Calace, Micha Moskovic, Axel Naumann and Giacomo Tenaglia.