Open science

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.

Model

The SPO model (“Souscrire Pour Ouvrir” in French, i.e. Subscribe to Open) is an economic model offered by Cairn.info, the principles of which are inspired by the Anglo-Saxon ‘Subscribe-to-open’ (S2O) model, originally developed by the American publisher Annual Reviews. It enables a journal to be made available in full open access whilst ensuring a sustainable business model, thanks to the financial support of a community of subscribing institutions.

Applications for the scheme are open to journals already available via a paid subscription on Cairn.info. Participating journals thus benefit from open access distribution free of charge on the platform, whilst securing the payment of annual royalties in return for the financial support provided by institutions subscribing to Cairn.info, both in France and worldwide. This mechanism reconciles the imperatives of full openness in scientific output, greater visibility for publications and the economic sustainability of the journal.

Vision

Whilst some may view a mandatory approach as the right way to accelerate a process whose complexity they deny, this is not the case for Cairn.info. Overly one-sided approaches have at times hindered the successful adoption of open science principles within the scientific publishing sector. The vision that Cairn.info embodies and champions is that this transition can only succeed if it enables the various stakeholders to play their full part in the evolving ecosystem: researchers, libraries, publishers and platforms, in all their diversity.

Perspectives

From 2027, as part of a joint initiative by the ABES (the French Higher Education Bibliographic Agency) and Cairn.info, publishers distributing their ebooks via Cairn.info will be able, if they so wish, to make a selection of titles previously available only via paid access freely accessible, in return for the payment of a lump sum per ebook. This new initiative will extend the "SPO" scheme to ebooks, going beyond journals.

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.

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. 

Cairn.info also offers millions of co-citation links between publications, organized across our database and freely available through the international Crossref directory.

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.