Open Access News

The start of the LHC [Large Hadron Collider] experiments at CERN in 2007 will be a major milestone for particle physics and for science at large. It will be a unique opportunity to reform the publishing paradigm of the particle physics community to ensure the widest, and most efficient, dissemination of results from this unique facility.

Recognizing this fact, CERN set up in December 2005 a tripartite “Task force on Open Access publishing in particle physics”, representing authors, publishers, and funding agencies and mandated to “study and develop sustainable business models for Open Access for existing and new journals and publishers in particle physics, focused mainly on a sponsoring model”. The task force envisions free and unrestricted Web-based access to peer-reviewed journals as the ultimate goal of Open Access (OA) publishing in particle physics; at the same time, it considers that OA publishing must be available to individual authors without financial barriers, and remain affordable for the community at large. To make the OA transition attractive and transparent to authors, the study focused on the conversion of established, high-profile journals, while leaving room for new, emerging journals in the field; to overcome the practical and psychological obstacle of traditional publication charges (author fees), the study focused on business models sponsored primarily by major laboratories and by funding agencies.

To survey the present particle physics journals landscape, and to sound the interest of relevant publishers to participate in a large-scale transition to OA, a questionnaire was sent in February 2006 to about 20 publishers for a total of about 40 different journals dealing with particle physics and/or closely related fields....For each journal, the publisher was asked whether he would consider a transition to OA under the condition that a sustainable business model could be identified....Amongst the journals ready for an OA transition are:

• Physical Review D and Physical Review Special Topics – Accelerators and Beams (PRST–AB, a sponsored OA journal already), published by the American Physical Society (APS);
• Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP), Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP), and Journal of Instrumentation (JINST), published by SISSA (Trieste) and presently marketed by Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP);
• The European Physical Journal C, published by Springer, EDP Sciences, and Società Italiana di Fisica.

In addition, some smaller and/or more highly specialized journals declared themselves ready for an OA transition, or are published under an OA business model already. These journals combined cover up to 50% of the original research literature in particle physics (excluding review articles, conference proceedings, and instrumentation papers)....

Based on the cost per article quoted by the publishers, and on the average number of papers published in the period 2003-2005, sponsoring all journals ready for OA at the time of the enquiry would require an annual budget of 5–6 Million €, significantly less than the present global expenditure for particle physics journal subscriptions.

To exploit this savings potential and to promote a rapid, large-scale transition of the particle physics community to OA publishing, the task force proposes a “Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics” (SCOAP3). Potential funding partners of this consortium are: [1] funding agencies supporting particle physics; [2] major particle physics laboratories; [3] major author communities, such as large experimental collaborations; [4] funding agencies supporting OA publishing in general; [5] libraries....

Tentatively, the task force envisages a transition period of five years to establish a ‘fair share’ scenario between funding agencies and other partners, to allow time for funding agencies to redirect budgets from journal subscriptions to OA sponsoring, and to allow time for more publishers to convert journals to OA. At the end of this period, the vast majority of particle physics literature should be available under an OA scheme. To allow for OA publication of LHC results from the outset, SCOAP3 should become operational not later than 2007.

For more background on the CERN OA task force, see the press release announcing its launch on December 14, 2005.

Comments.

1. First, apologies for not catching this sooner.
2. This is new and potentially big. It's the first time that anyone has tried to convert all the TA journals in a field to OA by offering to pay reasonable article processing fees. (None of the journals would charge authors.)
3. All or most of these articles would be OA through arXiv. Why isn't that enough? Here are a few answers. (1) arXiv deals more with unrefereed preprints than with refereed postprints. For many researchers (like Grigory Perelman) that's enough. But most researchers acknowledge that access to the published edition, if it can be arranged, is even better. (2) Converting the journals to OA will bring much-needed budget relief to lab and university libraries, which will be part of the consortium CERN is putting together. (3) While physics journals have coexisted with arXiv for 15 years, freely admit that they haven't lost subscriptions to it, and even host mirrors of it, they may worry that it's only a matter of time before arXiv and OA archiving will eat into their subscriptions.
4. Note the key discovery that makes the CERN plan feasible: "[S]ponsoring all journals ready for OA at the time of the enquiry would require an annual budget of 5–6 Million €, significantly less than the present global expenditure for particle physics journal subscriptions." This is the primary reason to believe that the long-term sustainability of OA journals is not in doubt (even if the transition is bumpy): the actual costs of peer review and publication are lower than the prices we currently pay for access through subscriptions.
5. Clearly this fact didn't escape the notice of the surveyed journals. If they convert to OA under this plan, then for most of them revenue will decrease even if the revenue that remains suffices to pay the bills. Why would they agree? My guess: they recognize that subscriptions are not sustainable in a world in which high-volume OA archiving is a fact of life and library budgets grow more slowly than published literature. The CERN plan offers survival and protection, which offset the greater revenue and greater risks of continuing as a subscription journal.
6. If CERN pulls this off, could the plan be duplicated in any other field? It may appear unlikely: CERN dominates particle physics in a way that no other institution dominates any field. Moreover, physicists and physics journals are unusually accustomed to OA through archiving. But remember that CERN plans to build a consortium of funding institutions, not to do it alone. And the rates of OA archiving are growing in other fields, especially as funders start to mandate it for the research they fund. It may work in particle physics and it may transfer to other fields.