The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) aims to redirect the subscriptions funds used for the core journals in the field of High-Energy Physics (HEP) to make them Open Access. This initiative is much more than a one-discipline-only solution to the nested issues of Open Access and subscriptions, it aims to prove that libraries can regain a central role in scholarly communication, aggressively promoting and achieving Open Access, in a cost-neutral fashion with the potential to generate medium and long term savings.
SCOAP3 is now collecting Expressions of Interest from partners worldwide to join the consortium....[T]hese are financial pledges to back the consortium if it will be able to deliver following a call for tender to publisher[s] for the Open Access price tag of their journals....Once it will have reached a critical mass, and thus demonstrated its legitimacy and credibility, SCOAP3 will be formally established, and its governance put in place. SCOAP3 will then issue its call for tender to publishers, assess the exact cost of the operation, and then move forward with negotiating and placing contracts with publishers....
In less than one year and a half, SCOAP3 has received pledges for 49.5% of its budget....Most European countries have joined the consortium: Austria, Belgium, CERN, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Slovak Republic, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom (JISC), with the remaining European partners poised to do so in the near future....The United States, which are the largest SCOAP3 partner with a projected contribution of about 1/4 of the SCOAP3 budget envelope, have already pledged about 1/2 of this contribution....Beyond Europe and North America, Turkey, Israel and Australia have also joined the consortium.
Negotiations are in progress for several countries in Asia, North and South America to join the consortium. These partners would represent an aggregated contribution of about 1/4 of the SCOAP3 budget envelope.
Formal discussion with the publishers have not officially started, as the tendering process cannot be launched before a larger fraction of the SCOAP3 budget is pledged. However, all major publishers show a pro-active attitude of great support to Open Access in HEP: Springer's European Physical Journal C offers Open Access free of charges for all articles in experimental HEP; Elsevier's Physics Letters B and Nuclear Physics B will publish Open Access without any author fees the first articles describing the HEP results of the LHC accelerators being commissioned at CERN; EPS' Europhysics Letters will publish Open Access free of charge all HEP articles while waiting for the SCOAP3 initiative to be operative. Other Open Access options in HEP are those of SISSA/IOPP, ...APS, ...and full Open Access journals such as the New Journal of Physics and PhysMath Central Physics A, supported by author fees....
To succeed, SCOAP3 needs pledges from more institutes in the U.S. who are interested in re-directing their subscription funds towards the initiative, and partners in other countries who are willing to take part in a countrywide re-organization of subscriptions to HEP journals for their re-direction towards the consortium....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/05/2008 11:29:00 AM.
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.
