Open source initiatives play a pivotal role at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). In 2023, CERN created a distinct Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) to coordinate related projects, and has since been leveraging its work to implement its new Open Science Policy.
In September 2025, CERN released its inaugural report on open science, to provide a first implementation overview of the Policy. The document highlights different initiatives which contribute to CERN’s efforts to widen access to its research, of which open source hardware and software are an essential pillar.
Open source as an open science enabler
According to Anne Gentil-Beccot, Open Science Coordinator, “Open science has been at the core of CERN’s work for decades [...], and there is a great spirit of collaboration and working on experiments together at CERN. Open source is a mode of collaboration, and working on it is connected with the way of working here”. As an example, she mentions the World Wide Web, which was created in 1990 at CERN, and then released to the public domain under an open source license.
The OSPO was initially founded to coordinate open source initiatives and serve as a contact point within the organisation. With representatives from 10 CERN departments and groups, it has become a reference both internally for the CERN community, and externally for stakeholders. The OSPO has already developed guidelines, best practices and recommendations, thus transforming the organisation’s approach to open source.
The OSPO constantly seeks to encourage new collaborations between CERN and external partners such as institutes, companies and start-ups. The Office has also been developing a software catalogue, which is expected to be launched soon. Building on the success of the hardware catalogue, the software repository’s goal will be to showcase projects built at CERN which have potential for external reuse.
An open source policy building on its internal community
In the words of Giacomo Tenaglia, Computer Scientist and OSPO Chair, “our idea is to help the existing community rather than building it”. There are already many CERN open source contributors within the organisation, and the explicit goal of the OSPO is to build on their potential and concentrate it, to increase the quality of software published.
A project CERN has been developing together with Software Heritage since January 2025 goes in that direction. Their aim is to attempt to quantify the contribution of CERN affiliates to open source. As contributions are hard to trace and identify, their methodology consists of following user e-mail addresses linked to CERN to measure their contributions and their impact.
Similarly, in October 2025, CERN signed a collaboration agreement with the German Centre for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDis). The goal of this cooperation is to leverage ZenDis' experience in supporting the public sector in building digital tools based on open solutions, and explore opportunities for the laboratory to include its software in the openCode catalogue. CERN also has an established partnership with the Sovereign Tech Agency.
An Open Source Strategy Workshop also took place on 23 October, adhering panelists from CERN, the Sovereign Tech Agency and ZenDis to discuss the strategic importance of open source for international organisations. It was followed by an Open Source at CERN in 2025/2026 event led by its OSPO.
Running an Open Science Policy within a public organisation also comes with challenges, and one Micha Moskovic, member of the Open Science Team, highlights the “tension between keeping and sharing”. CERN also has a Knowledge Transfer group (KT), which is responsible for maximising the dissemination impact of CERN technologies. For this reason, the KT group is also represented in the OSPO.
The report and its findings on the progress of the Open Science Policy for 2023-2024 will now allow CERN to develop its implementation plans for the next two years. As Anne Gentil-Beccot concluded, the key to fast progress is “to develop community engagement and reach out to the different communities to create coordination among them. Without a solid network, we cannot progress as fast”.
Updated on 24 November 2025 with additional details.
