Scientific Collaboration
Open science at CERN, and the community behind the Node
Open Science at CERN
At CERN, the practice of open science is key to delivering on the organisational mission.
CERN Open Science encompasses an evolving ecosystem of policies, initiatives, services, and technologies, driven by people from across the organisation with the goal to maximise the global impact of research, spanning open access, open data, open source, open hardware, and citizen science. The CERN Node extends that practice into the EOSC Federation, in collaboration with partner institutions across high-energy physics and beyond.
Competence Centre & Training
Learn to leverage HEP software frameworks, Machine Learning tools, and distributed infrastructure through curated training programs.
Data Management Plans
Guidelines and templates for managing research data throughout the project lifecycle, aligned with FAIR principles.
Contributing Organisations
CERN departments, INSPIRE-HEP collaboration (DESY, Fermilab, IHEP, IN2P3, SLAC), Durham University, and ESCAPE partners.
ESCAPE
CERN also pursues open science through ESCAPE, the European Science Cluster of Astronomy & Particle Physics ESFRI Research Infrastructures, in which CERN participates alongside partner institutions from astronomy, nuclear, and particle physics, working toward shared, FAIR-compliant services connected to EOSC.
The direction of travel in scientific computing, well beyond ESCAPE, is federation. The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), around 160 computing centres in more than 40 countries built to store, distribute, and analyse the LHC's data, has long shown how a federated model can work at this scale. High-performance computing is moving the same way, and initiatives such as the EOSC Federation pursue a similar goal for the broader Open Science ecosystem: democratising access to computing capabilities, in the spirit of WLCG, with CERN among the participants. ESCAPE sits at the intersection of these federations, co-developing shared infrastructure and tools so that researchers can draw on heterogeneous resources without the overhead of managing each one separately.
Looking ahead, the collaboration has set out its Distributed Computing Roadmap for 2026–2030, coordinating computing infrastructure strategy across particle physics and astronomy partners including CERN, the Einstein Telescope, the Square Kilometer Array Observatory, the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory, and several other communities.