Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, December 13, 2007

Profile of the SCOAP3 project

Glennda Chui, Free for All, Symmetry, October/November 2007.  Excerpt:

The next big experiment in particle physics won’t need an accelerator, detector, or other big machine....If it works, no one will have to pay to read most particle physics results. The journals that publish most of the research in the field will be available free online to anyone, anywhere and any time. Money to run the journals—including the cost of having experts review each article before it sees print—would instead come from funding agencies, laboratories and libraries through a consortium called SCOAP3, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics. This would give journals a stable source of funding while reducing the total cost to libraries and readers....

[T]he consortium won’t work without participation from all the countries where physics is done. The United States is a crucial player, since about a quarter of the published research originates here. Yet its budgetary system is highly complex, with money for journal subscriptions coming out of thousands of separate pockets....

However, the average cost of journal subscriptions has been rising far faster than inflation; between 2003 and 2007, for instance, the average cost of subscribing to 103 physics journals jumped 42 percent, according to the 2007 Library Journal Periodical Prices Survey. Many library budgets can’t keep up. Some have been dumping subscriptions....”

As more institutions pare their subscription lists, there’s a danger that journals will have to raise prices for their remaining subscribers, leading to more cancellations and more price increases that eventually force journals out of business. “The present system is not sustainable.” says Salvatore Mele, a physicist at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Switzerland, and spokesman for the SCOAP3 project....

Noting that 83 percent of published particle physics articles posted on arXiv are from six leading journals, the international consortium proposes to convert five of those core journals to full open access: Physical Review D, Physics Letters B, Nuclear Physics B, Journal of High Energy Physics, and European Physical Journal C. In addition, articles in Physical Review Letters that involve high-energy physics, about 10 percent of the total, would become open access. The consortium is also open to other high-quality particle physics journals.

Each nation that carries out physics research would contribute to the consortium according to how many articles its scientists publish, with special allowances made for developing nations that cannot afford to pay.

One concern raised about open-access publishing is that it might free libraries from the burden of skyrocketing subscription costs, only to force authors to pay fees out of their research grants, reducing the amount of money available for lab equipment, graduate students and other essentials. SCOAP3 offers a way around that, Mele says, by diverting money now used for subscriptions into the consortium while leaving research funds intact....

The proposal is making rapid progress, Mele adds: The major European players have already pledged about a third of the needed funding, and there are growing signs of interest from libraries in the United States and both libraries and funding agencies in Asia....

For their part, the biggest publishers in particle physics—Elsevier, Springer, and the APS—all say they’re receptive to the idea, if it can be made to work....

“In a way, a publisher has to be agnostic on these things. This is a matter of politics, funding, and science,” says Christian Caron, publishing editor for EPJC. “What is rather clear is the majority of big collaborations in this world have signed petitions saying yes, we are only going to publish in open- access journals....”

Even among supportive publishers, there is a fear that the transition to open access could be rough, and might even put them out of business.

“We would be delighted if the SCOAP3 initiative worked,” says Serene of the APS. “But we would be hesitant to sign onto this thing unless we were really certain it had long-term financial stability,” which is hard to guarantee if the funding comes out of government budgets that change year-to-year....”

To Suber, though, physics is offering scholarly publishing a model for how to make that transition.

“Somehow physics did everything right,” he says. “Its levels of self-archiving are approaching 100 percent, and its journals have not seen cancellations. In physics we’re seeing the journals convert even when they’re prospering, and they’re doing it through coordinated negotiations with other stakeholders. It’s being done through discipline and reasoning. Nobody is over a barrel. Everybody’s doing it because it looks like a better idea.”

If other fields can move to open access through this kind of “peaceable negotiation, rather than trauma,” he says, “we should do that.”