The centre Mersenne : by researchers, for researchers

The centre Mersenne is a diamond open access publishing platform for scientific publications. It provides all the publishing tools and services that enable editorial teams to manage, produce and disseminate their publications. The centre Mersenne is run by a public organization and its operation is not-for-profit, created by researchers, for researchers. Indeed, the centre Mersenne is developed by Mathdoc, a support and research unit of CNRS and Université Grenoble Alpes, which gives it financial sustainability and enables it to host open access journals, i.e. at no cost to either authors or readers. The governance of the centre Mersenne is managed by researchers who are organized in two committees. The Steering Committee, composed of representatives of the supervisory bodies and the project, is kept informed of the activity, gives guidelines and decides on priorities when the workload exceeds the available resources. And the scientific council provides advice to the steering committee on journal acceptance, orientations and priorities. We develop a personalized relationship with the editorial teams of our journals. Every two years, we organise a meeting with journal editors to present our latest developments and services in detail. This meeting provides an opportunity to discuss specific issues relating to scientific publishing that are directly or indirectly linked to the practices and needs of researchers and likely to influence the future development of the centre Mersenne. Thus, the centre Mersenne listens to new needs and regularly upgrades the platform, making the tools more flexible and increasing the skills of the team. The integrity of research is preserved thanks to the editorial independence of the centre Mersenne's journals. Indeed, journals remain the property of researchers. This guarantees the autonomy and freedom of researchers. The editors-in-chief have full responsibility for the editorial content, and the composition of the teams is transparent and displayed on each journal website. In addition, all our journals are peer-reviewed, guaranteeing equal treatment for all submissions. Some journals even distribute the reviewers' reports. The centre Mersenne promotes the view that open access should be the normal way of disseminating research without any financial, legal or technical barrier. Research outputs should be freely, openly available to everyone over the long term. This involves the use of free Creative Commons licenses, ideally CC-BY. Moreover, all centre Mersenne journals allow their authors to deposit all versions of their article (editor's version, submitted version, accepted version), without embargo, as long as they indicate the url in open archives, under the licence indicated by the journal on its website. This improves visibility and access to research results. At a technical level, the platform provides all the publishing tools and services that enable editorial teams to manage, produce and distribute their publications freely. For example, all our metadata are interoperable: OAI-PMH protocols, metadata export, DOI attribution via Crossref, etc. We also offer tools such as Cited-by, for adding links to references. We also guarantee the longevity of our data via the CLOCKSS system.