Open science
Cairn.info strives to find a reasonable balance between open science and maintaining a diverse, high-quality French-language publishing landscape.
Moving wall
In line with our mission, we endeavor to strike a balance between freely accessible content (notably via the moving wall system) and content reserved for subscribed institutions. This is a key issue in academia, where open and free access content is increasingly the order of the day.
Articles available for free
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Moving wall
Period after which the commercial exploitation of a publication ends and it becomes freely accessible to any internet user. Its duration depends on the specific journal, economic model, and discipline, but generally ranges from 1 to 3 years.
Souscrire Pour Ouvrir (SPO)
Model
SPO (“Souscrire Pour Ouvrir” in French) is an economic model offered by Cairn.info and inspired by the model "Subscribe to open" originally developed by the publisher Annual Reviews. It enables a journal to be fully open access, thanks to the financial support of a community of subscribing institutions.
Interested journals are invited to determine the annual funding that would be necessary to offset the loss of other revenues (print and digital) and make it possible to distribute their publications freely were this sum to be raised.
Vision
We do not believe that mandatory policies are the best way to implement complex systems. An overly unilateral approach has been seen to hinder the proper adoption of open science principles in our sector. Our view is that this transition will only succeed if it allows the various actors in the evolving ecosystem to play their roles to the fullest: researchers, libraries, publishers, and platforms, in all their diversity.
Institutional funding
Thanks to the institutional funding model, several publications on Cairn.info are available for free, backed by institutions such as the Caisse nationale des allocations familiales (CNAF; National Family Allowance Fund), L’agence française de développement (AFD; French Development Agency), and the École nationale supérieure d’architecture Paris-Malaquais (Paris-Malaquais School of Architecture). These tend to be journals but sometimes include books distributed by Cairn.
Journals distributed through the institutional funding model
Author directory
In partnership with organizations like Abes, we have recently aligned the Cairn.info author database with IdRef, leading the path to ORCID alignements and other bibliographic enrichments.
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IdRef - Identifiers and Repositories for Higher Education and Research
IdRef is a public interface for consulting authority records produced by member institutions of the French higher education and research documentary networks (Sudoc, Calames, Star). IdRef is available for authorized professional users to create/correct/enrich authority records. IdRef also provides a range of freely available services to facilitate data reuse (triplestore data.idref.fr, OAI-PMH repository, APIs).
www.idref.fr
To go further
Co-citation links
Cairn.info also offers millions of co-citation links between publications, organized across our database and freely available through the international Crossref directory.
Partner platforms
Working with over 250 publishing bodies, our approach is inherently cooperative and mutually beneficial. We also maintain a decade-long collaboration with OpenEdition—a platform distributing mainly open access journals, as well as some articles behind a moving wall—enabling us to offer recent publications from around 50 journals to our institutional and individual subscribers. Likewise, with platforms like Gallica, Érudit, and Persée, we have established interoperability gateways to facilitate user navigation.
