Dear Reader and Author,

As you may be aware, Mechanics & Industry transitions to open access at the start of January 2021 and is now fully open access.

Besides the present papers, we have the pleasure to announce that archives will also be freely available starting from 2021.

The purpose of this Editorial is to provide some background as to why the decision to transition was taken.

Mechanics & Industry, official journal of the Association Française de Mécanique (AFM), has been co-published with EDP Sciences since 2004.

The joint decision to transition the journal to open access underlines the AFM's policy of supporting open science. It is particularly keen to facilitate exchanges between researchers and industry and highlight collaborative projects. EDP Sciences has been committed to open access from the beginning of the movement and, like the AFM, supports a continuous move towards open science. It is committed to helping journals transition to open access if they so wish.

Open access provides an exciting opportunity for Mechanics & Industry to grow and places it at the forefront of developments in the sector, closely following the recommendations of the French national plan for open science and, of course, Plan S supported by a range of European institutions. The journal will be disseminated much more widely, both nationally and internationally, and will gain more exposure within the industry.

The journal already benefits from the reach of open access; submissions via the existing ‘open access option’ have been popular and 80 open access articles have been published since 2017 (of which 39 were under the ‘French National Open Access Agreement’). Several open access special issues have also been published and proved to be very popular.

What does this mean for authors?

Authors are now required to pay an article processing charge (APC) to publish in Mechanics & Industry. The APC is set at €1100 for 2021.

Corresponding authors from institutions which are part of the French National Open Access Agreement will continue to publish in Mechanics & Industry with no article processing charges (APCs). Similar agreements are already in place with German academic institutions and the Chinese Academy of Sciences institutes. The French Association of Mechanics (AFM) and EDP Sciences will continue their efforts to secure funding for APCs via such agreements.

Waivers will be available also for authors affiliated with an institution in the Group A of the Research4Life programme.

Authors will also benefit from the transition to full open access. The journal will publish articles under a CC-BY license, enabling authors to retain copyright and be fully compliant with any open access requirements of funding organisations.

Other changes

With this flip of the Journal in Open Access, changes in its structure will be performed: papers will be published as soon as they are ready in a continuous volume during the year. This will accelerate the publication.

We hope you agree, the growing demand for open access, encouraged by such initiatives as the ‘Plan national’ and ‘Plan S’, makes this the right time to make this change.

We hope the journal will develop successfully in this Open Access road and both Readers and Authors will benefit from these changes.

Pr Régis Dufour, Editor-in-Chief

Pr Eric Arquis, Chairman of AFM

Dr Ariana Fuga, Senor Editor EDP Sciences

© R. Dufour et al., Published by EDP Sciences 2021