Open Access News

A group of particle physicists has proposed a new way to pay for immediate free access to journal articles in their field. They want to raise five million to six million euros (about US $7-million) a year to buy open access to peer-reviewed papers in top physics journals.

A committee led by scientists at CERN, the high-energy-physics laboratory near Geneva, has sought new ways to make articles in traditional, subscription-based journals available to anyone interested in physics. One solution they settled upon in a recent report was to create a consortium of large labs and grant-making agencies to pool money for such an effort. That report, which was issued in June, has already persuaded key publishers to offer the option of an upfront payment to make individual research reports free to nonsubscribers.

"We see this as where the community is going," said Daniel Kulp, assistant editorial director of the American Physical Society, which will offer an open-access option for seven physics journals....Elsevier, the largest publisher of scientific journals, has also begun to offer authors the option to pay a fee to make their papers freely available through its ScienceDirect Web...."It's a clear signal that publishers see that the subscription model won't last," said Jens Vigen, a scientific-information officer at CERN....

The proposed consortium also hopes to focus on a growing inequality in who pays for publishing....

Peter Suber, director of the Open Access Project at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group in Washington, thinks the CERN committee's efforts could increase open access in other fields as well. "That kind of coalition could be duplicated in other fields that don't have their own CERN," he said.

The open-access movement also got a boost from university administrators this month in an open letter signed by presidents of 56 liberal-arts colleges who voiced their support for free access to information gained through federally funded research. They join a group of 25 research-university provosts who took a similar stand in July....

"We're looking to build support for the Senate bill [FRPAA]," said Nancy S. Dye, president of Oberlin College, who helped to draft the letter. "This is important for anyone who is interested in new knowledge."

Even though publishers scale their subscription costs to the size of an institution, librarians at liberal-arts colleges cannot afford to provide access to many research journals. "For liberal-arts colleges, it's a paradoxical situation where the technology allows access to so much information, yet within the traditional literature, scholars are losing access due to budget considerations," said Ray English, head librarian at Oberlin.

The college presidents lead institutions in 21 states, a geographic spread that may help their cause. "Members of Congress listen to this," said Mr. Suber, of Public Knowledge. "They want to know that this is important to institutions in their state....Institutions that speak for the interests of research support [open access to publicly-funded research]."