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About the centre Mersenne

The centre Mersenne is a public publishing infrastructure serving the scientific community.

It aims to promote scientific publishing and dissemination of publications (journals, books, seminars and conferences) from all scientific disciplines (mathematics, physics, statistics, computer science…), both national and international, committed to open access and publishing mainly in LaTeX.

The centre Mersenne offers:

Missions

The centre Mersenne, set up by the CNRS and the Université Grenoble Alpes – UGA in response to a request from the scientific community, offers an alternative means of publication:

public and not-for-profit (no privatisation of the research outputs),
diamond open access (no fee for the reader to read and the author to publish),
sustainable and affordable,
created by researchers for researchers.

The Centre Mersenne has a dual purpose:

to promote scientific publishing

To support the editorial teams

Who the Centre Mersenne is aimed at?

Researchers

Editorial teams

Who we are

Mathdoc

The centre Mersenne was launched in January 2018 under the impetus of CNRS and UGA, with the support of the Grenoble IDEX.

The platform is developed by Mathdoc, a support and research unit of CNRS and Université Grenoble Alpes. Its mission is to develop documentary and publishing projects for the French mathematics community: Numdam, Portail Math or the centre Mersenne.

A team of designers, IT specialists, editors and managers, led by mathematicians :

Scientific Officer

Evelyne Miot

Scientific Officer

Vincent Beffara

Operational Officer

Célia Vaudaine

Technical Officer

Olivier Labbe

Developer

Patrick Bernaud

Developer

Simon Chevance

LaTeX Copy-editor

Alexandre Moeschler

LaTeX Copy-editor

Nicolas Franco-Nollet

System Administrator

Franck Lontin

Administrative and Financial Administration

Céline Talbi

Editorial Secretary

Mouhamadou-Moustapha Deme

Documentation Officer

Murielle Serlet

Developer

Matthieu Guimard

GOVERNANCE

Steering committee

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.

Scientific council

It provides advice to the steering committee on journal acceptance, orientations and priorities. It is composed of:

Editorial policy

  • The Centre Mersenne promotes the view that open acess 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 licenses, such as Creative Commons CC-0, CC-BY, CC-BY-ND. See the summary table of the dissemination policies of the journals hosted on our platform.
  • The Centre Mersenne’s agenda is to support Diamond Open Access or Gold OA without APC (no fees required to read nor to publish). This is why Open Access is one of the Centre Mersenne’s main selection criteria for publications willing to join.
  • The Centre Mersenne adheres to the principles stated by the International Council for Science.
  • Self-archiving: 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 .
  • Peer-review process is one of the Centre Mersenne’s selection criteria. This ensures a state-of-the-art quality-control over the published papers. All the articles of the publications published by the Centre Mersenne are reviewed by peers.
  • The centre Mersenne encourages journal editorial teams to adhere to the COPE guidelines on peer review.
  • The Centre Mersenne supports the Peer Review process through its service ‘Support to editorial process’ with the OJS software.

The Centre Mersenne is run by a public organization and its operation is not-for-profit, created by researchers, for researchers. It endeavours to fight research output’s privatisation and outrageous profit-making out of the scientific commons.

  • The Centre Mersenne takes care of long-term preservation of every document published. To do this, we used the CLOCKSS permanent archiving solution.
  • All documents and data hosted at Centre Mersenne are archived and can be made available for free, in case the Centre Mersenne were to cease activities.

The Centre Mersenne is committed to be transparent on its business model, pricing structure, and selection procedure.

Business model

The Centre Mersenne is committed to be transparent on its business model, pricing structure, and selection procedure. This logic requires stable and sustainable resources.
The economic model chosen by the centre Mersenne is a mixed one, since it involves a joint participation of the sponsoring institutions and the publications, depending on the services they request.

Structure of funding sources

The centre Mersenne has several sources of funding: its sponsors, journals, donations and project funding.

Thus, the CNRS (CNRS Mathématiques, DDOR) and the Université Grenoble Alpes, the two supervisors of the centre Mersenne, grant fixed and exceptional subsidies to our publishing platform.

Journals contribute to the cost of installation, maintenance and provision of certain optional services for their websites.

The centre Mersenne also receives donations from laboratories, universities and libraries. If you wish to make a donation, you can contact us at the contact address. Our main donors :

Finally, the centre Mersenne also benefits from grants linked to the projects it works on:

Cost structure

The cost structure and corresponding funding sources are as follows

Correlation between the cost structure and the sources of funding :

Cost structure Resource structure
Infrastructure and maintenance (fixed cost) Administrative supervision: human resources, infrastructure and operating costs
Journals: maintenance costs
Research and development Tutelles
Project
Coordination and support for editorial teams Administrative supervision
One-time costs of setting up a publication Tutelles
Journals
Variable costs incurred by the flow of each journal (depending on the services selected and the editorial organisation and publication volume) Journal