Open Access News

The SCOAP3 Working Party, Towards Open Access Publishing in High Energy Physics Report of the SCOAP3 Working Party, CERN, April 19, 2007 (but released today).  (Thanks to Jens Vigen.)

High Energy Physics (HEP) pioneered OA through “repositories” containing collections of “pre-prints” freely accessible on the Internet. Today about 90% of HEP pre-prints are available in repositories. Thanks to the speed with which they make results available, repositories have become the lifeblood of HEP scientific information exchange. However, repositories do not perform peer review and may contain only the original versions of articles submitted to journals, and not necessarily the final, peer-reviewed, published versions.

Notwithstanding the success of repositories, there is consensus in the scientific community about the need for high-quality journals....

The price of an electronic journal is mainly driven by the costs of running the peer-review system and editorial processing. Most publishers quote a price in the range of 1’000–2’000 Euros per published article. On this basis we estimate that the annual budget for the transition of HEP publishing to OA would amount to a maximum of 10 Million Euros per year. In comparison, the annual list-price of a single “core” HEP journal today can be as high as 10’000 Euros; for 500 institutes worldwide actively involved in HEP, this represents an annual expenditure of 5 Million Euros.

The proposed initiative aims to convert high-quality HEP journals to OA, pursuing two goals:

• to provide open and unrestricted access to all HEP research literature in its final, peer-reviewed form;
• to contain the overall cost of journal publishing by increasing competition while assuring sustainability.

In the present proposal, the publishers’ subscription income from multiple institutions is replaced by income from a single financial partner, the “Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics” (SCOAP3). SCOAP3 is a global network of funding agencies, research laboratories, and libraries. Each SCOAP3 partner will recover its contribution from the cancellation of its current journal subscriptions. This model avoids the obvious disadvantage of OA models in which authors are directly charged for the OA publication of their articles....

In practice, the OA transition will be facilitated by the fact that the large majority of HEP articles are published in just six peer-reviewed journals from four publishers. Five of those six journals carry a majority of HEP content....

HEP has a natural overlap with related fields such as, but not limited to, astroparticle physics and nuclear physics. The five “core” journals include between 10% and 30% of articles in these disciplines, which will be naturally and logically included in the OA transition. This is in the interest of the readership and promotes the long-term goal of an extension of the SCOAP3 model to these related disciplines....

Of course, the SCOAP3 model is open to any other, present or future, high-quality journals carrying HEP content....

The annual budget for the SCOAP3 operation will be established through a tendering procedure. The tender and the subsequent contracts with publishers will address the use of OA articles, the conditions for un-bundling OA journals from existing subscription packages, and the reduction of subscription prices for “broadband” journals following the conversion of a fraction of articles to OA.

Provided that the SCOAP3 funding partners are ready to engage in long-term commitments, many publishers are expected to be ready to enter into negotiations along the lines proposed here. The SCOAP3 model could be implemented during 2007. Once leading funding agencies will pledge funds for the financial backing of the consortium, the tendering procedure could take place during summer and the exact budget envelope could be known by autumn. A Memorandum of Understanding for the governance of SCOAP3 and the cost sharing could then be signed by the funding agencies; this will be followed by the establishment of contracts with publishers. OA publishing in HEP could then become reality as of the beginning of 2008....

Comment.  It's very exciting to see this ambitious project move from the drawing board to the streets.  I repeat my assessment from last December:

We're watching a massive transition to OA in process.  This is not only the first project to convert all the TA journals in a field to OA; it's also succeeding.  It's succeeding in pulling together the needed stakeholders and it's succeeding in raising the money.  It's also succeeding in showing that the final result will cost the stakeholders less than the current system. 

OA advocates have always argued that funding OA doesn't require new money, just a redirection of the money now spent on subscriptions....What's most significant about the CERN project is that it's a large-scale, discipline-wide, stakeholder-united redirection project.... 

Finally, CERN is on track to accomplish this feat with fusion, not fission --or with cooperation and comity all around rather than antagonism and division....