Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Friday, December 14, 2007

LANL joins SCOAP3

LANL Research Library joins Open Access consortium for particle physics publishing--SCOAP3, a press release from the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Research Library, December 13, 2007.  Excerpt:

The LANL Research Library has joined several libraries in the US and internationally in expressing support for the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3). SCOAP3 aims to make articles in selected high energy physics (HEP) journals free to read for everyone. It is a proposed mechanism for a field of science (in this case particle physics) to pay for its own publishing costs, rather than make the readers of its journals pay via subscriptions or authors pay via author fees.

In this model, HEP funding agencies and libraries, which today purchase journal subscriptions to implicitly support the peer-review service, federate to explicitly cover the base costs of publishing and peer-review, and the associated publishers make the electronic versions of their HEP journals free to read widely across the globe.

In the proposed SCOAP3 model, everyone involved in producing the literature of particle physics (universities, labs, and funding agencies) pays into the consortium which then pays publishers and all articles in the field become available via Open Access....

There is a growing concern within the academy that the future of high-quality journals, and the peer-review system they administer, is at risk. SCOAP3 is developed to address this situation for HEP and, as an experiment, Science at large. SCOAP3 proposes, for the first time, to link quality and price thereby stimulating competition and enabling considerable medium- and long-term savings....

For more information please see the Report of the SCOAP3 Working Party or the SCOAP3 FAQ for US Libraries.