Since its creation, the French Academy of Sciences has been dedicated to the development of science and advising government authorities in this field. It is particularly committed to encouraging scientific life through the production of knowledge, through various publications such as its journal Comptes Rendus. Its mission is also to "maintain the role and quality of French scientific language" (art. 2 of the Statutes of the Academy, approved by decree of the President of the Republic on January 31, 2003, n° MENS 0300009D).
As such, although most manuscripts submitted to Comptes Rendus are written in English, any author may choose to write in French. As a result, the two languages sometimes cohabit within the same annual volume or special issue.
To facilitate referencing of their articles in academic search engines and international bibliographic databases, Comptes Rendus also endeavors to provide titles, abstracts and keywords in both French and English. When these metadata are not supplied directly by the authors themselves, they are translated by the journal editorial teams using automatic language processing software, and then submitted to the authors for approval.
Comptes Rendus Biologies articles are published in their entirety in French and English, with the journal's editorial team at the disposal of authors who may have difficulty handling either of these languages.
Since 2020, six of the seven series of the French Academy of Sciences' Comptes Rendus (Mathématique, Mécanique, Physique, Géoscience, Chimie and Biologies) have been distributed in partnership with the Mersenne Center. In 2022, these two partners obtained financial support from the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research (through the second call for projects launched by the French National Fund for Open Science in 2021) and the French Ministry of Culture's Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France for the development of a semi-automatic translation platform for articles in these journals. This joint project had two objectives:
Translations of journal articles are made available to the public in order to increase their international circulation, but their scientific relevance and linguistic accuracy are not verified by the authors or the journal editorial teams. They do not engage the scientific responsibility of the publishers. For all research purposes, we recommend using the original published version.
Translations of Comptes Rendus articles are released under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license, authorizing anyone interested to share and adapt them, on the express condition of crediting the original work (the translation itself, but also the article originally published in Comptes Rendus) and its authors.
You will find at the beginning of each translation the citation information to be included for any redistribution or reuse.