Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, March 01, 2008

Notes on the SCOAP3 US Focal Meeting

Peter Brantley has blogged some notes on the SCOAP3 US Focal Meeting (Berkeley, February 29, 2008). 

Rick Luce, Emory Univ.:

Open access has been seen as a solution to the pricing crisis. But over the course of a decade, it has not made much real progress....

Salvatore Mele, CERN....

HEP [high energy physics] and Open access: synergy. HEP is decades ahead in thinking open access - for over 40 years, mountains of paper preprint were shipped all over the world. Cost CERN: $1.5M a year. HEP launched arXiv in 1991, the archetypal open archive. Also established the first open access peer reviewed electronic journals.

HEP is a small connected, community (<20,000), publishes a small number of articles (<10,000), in a small number of journals (<10). Reader and author communities overlap. Open access is second nature: posting on arXiv before even submitting to a journal is common practice. No mandate, no debate, no advocacy — author-driven. Author-formatted post-peer-review routinely uploaded. Open access has strong support from LHC [large hadron collider] communities.

In August 2007, ICFA (Int’l Committee for Future Accelerators) “encourages all concerned parties from all world regions to actively get involved in the scoap3 initiative to assure its success.” In January 2008, HEP Advisory Panel of the U.S. DoE “strongly supports this initiative contingent to its sustainability.”

Journals are on the way to losing — or have lost — a century-old role as vehicles of scholarly communication.

Nonetheless,...[t]he HEP community needs high quality journals, as our interface with “officialdom.” Implicitly, the HEP community supports this role by purchasing subscriptions, as it continues to read only at arXiv. Subscription prices ultimately make the model unsustainable. As an “all-arXiv” discipline, HEP is at high risk to see its journals canceled by large research libraries (which is already happening)....

[F]ull text downloads per user range from 0.6 to 0.1 per year in the core HEP-focussed journals. Physicists do not read HEP journals; they read arXiv.

Eventually all of scholarship will be in this position, reading from open access and community portals....

Today: funding bodies, through libraries, buy journal subscriptions to support peer-review service and to allow their patrons to read articles. Tomorrow: Funding bodies and libraries contribute to the SCOAP3 consortium that pays centrally for peer-review services. Articles are free to read for everyone....

LHC is the largest collaboration that science has ever seen; in contrast, SCOAP3 is peanuts....

So far, over half of the total necessary has already been pledged or committed as of the end of February 2008 (and moving quickly)....

Once a sizeable fraction of the budget is pledged, SCOAP3 can issue a tender to publishers....