CERN Conference Series on Scholarly Communication Innovation draft mission statement by Thomas Krichel

With the advent of powerful computers and wide-spread use telecommunication networks, scholarly communication is going through a phase of rapid change. The CERN Conference Series on Scholarly Communication Innovation (CCSSCI) is a meeting place for leaders of this change.

The CCSSCI was created to maximise the benefit of the adoption of Open Archiving systems as recommended by the Open Archives Initiative. The work of the Initivative remains a central theme for the conference. For the reason, the conference is also know as the CERN OAI conference series.

Leaders of change in scholarly communication include scholars, publishers, librarians, and computer scientists. The latter provide work on the technological changes that are the reason of the change in scholarly communications.

A conference in the series is broadly organized in three consecutive parts.

1. A technical part concerning the lastest in computing and information technology that can be used in scholarly communication or that has been specifically designed for such use.
2. An organizational part that concerns the current implementations using such technologies by leaders in the field.
3. A community part that invites scholars to guide future developments in this area. Each individual conference has is own community part that focusses on a specific community.

The conference takes place every two years at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. It's organizing committee operates under the auspices of the Access Division of LIBER (Ligue Européenne des Bibliothèques de Recherche).