EPL and Open Access Articles, Europhysics Letters, January 2008. A "Publishers' Note" from the six-person EPL Management Committee. Excerpt:
In May 2007 the EPLA [Europhysics Letters Association] Board of Directors welcomed the CERN initiative for the creation of a Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) and agreed to enter into negotiations to enable high energy physics papers to be published in EPL with selective open access.
At a subsequent meeting in August 2007, the Board decided to offer substantial initial discount while open access remained a small fraction of the content of EPL. A necessary precursor to negotiation with SCOAP3 is a general open access policy. The Directors agreed that this policy should offer a free-to-read option for all authors in all sections of EPL and so provide fair opportunities across the broad range of physics covered by EPL. The policy for the journal should allow individual authors, their institutions, funding agencies or sponsoring consortia to pay for published articles to be freely available to all, permanently....
EPL would remain a subscription journal for content that is not free to read and authors, institutions or funding agencies may choose to pay for their articles to be open access.
As an initial step in this open access venture, a single-article fee of € 1000 ($ 1330) can now be paid by individuals who choose to have their article published free to all. This pricing, which is substantially discounted, ensures that EPL remains competitive with other similar journals. EPL will continue to ensure this policy is sustainable although the journal must remain financially viable and the pricing scheme will be under continual review.
At this stage we welcome enquires concerning an institutional membership fee that would allow that institute to pay in advance for open access publications in EPL for authors from that institute....
Remember all articles are already free to read for 30 days from their online publication date....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/13/2008 12:01:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
