Open Access News

Letter from Frank Zimmerman of CERN (excerpt): 'In the field of accelerator physics a major fraction of our literature is nowadays made available through open-access publications. Our main conference series, i.e. PAC, EPAC, and APAC, are all published as open-access through JACoW. Our scientific articles are to a large extent submitted to Physical Review Special Topics - Accelerators and Beams (PRST-AB), a peer-reviewed, all-electronic journal published by the American Physical Society. The journal is available to everyone without subscription or pay-per-view fees and even without author charges, all thanks to the support of sponsors. PRST-AB has quickly become the primary means of communicating new results in accelerator physics, but so far, unfortunately, no European institutions are among its sponsors. I hope that this situation will soon change to ensure the continuity of open-access publishing in accelerator physics.'

Letter from Martin Blume, editor-in-chief of APS (excerpt): 'Ken Peach's article on open access was met, on my part, with a combination of a grain of salt and wry amusement. The American Physical Society started an all-electronic open-access journal called Physical Review Special Topics - Accelerators and Beams that has been successfully published since 1998. The journal has been endorsed by the Division of the Physics of Beams of the APS and the Accelerators Group of the European Physical Society. It has been supported by sponsorship contributions from large accelerator laboratories in the US and Canada, with no charges either to authors or to readers. This only partially covers its costs, and the shortfall has to be made up by the APS. This is sustainable in the short term, but becomes an increasing burden as more articles than the current 10 per month are published. Periodically I hear of endorsement by one or another part of CERN for open-access journals, but in spite of occasional requests CERN has declined to become a sponsor of PRST-AB. To date 52 articles have been published with one or more CERN authors, and more have been based on results from CERN accelerators. Isn't it time that CERN - one of, if not the, largest accelerator laboratories in the world - came forward?'

Letter from Burton Richter, SLAC (excerpt): 'Ken Peach advocates open access to scientific literature...but doesn't deal with who will pay for the essential services that the journal publishers provide. Two that concern me are archiving and keeping up on the rest of physics. In the open-access world, who will be responsible for keeping research results available for the long term? I can now access any article published in more than 100 years of existence of the Physical Review. In this case the American Physical Society has taken responsibility for keeping the material available as computer operating systems evolve and as storage media change. This needs to be paid for and it is part of the subscription fee that would be abolished in the new world....[I] want to keep up with other areas [outside my specialization], and have neither the expertise nor the time to sort through everything to find the important article that might be submitted to a site open to everything. The journals, their editors, and their referees do the screening for me. If we are not all to become narrow specialists, this needs to be paid for too.'

Letter from Tord Ekelöf, chair of the organizing committee for Lepton-Photon 2005 (excerpt): 'I would like to support Ken Peach's viewpoint that the community of high-energy physicists needs to take more initiative in favour of open-access publishing. Clearly, the question of how to cover the costs for such publishing is not trivial. However, in the case of conference proceedings the conference organizers are responsible for the financing of the publication and it should therefore not be a problem to apply the principles of open-access publishing at least in this case. Some publishers are in fact quite receptive to open-access publication, but one must, of course, bring the issue up when negotiating the publishing order. As an example of this, I can report that the organizing committee of the Lepton-Photon 2005 symposium has negotiated with World Scientific to publish the proceedings in a limited number of paper copies as well in an open-access electronic version. The publishing agreement stipulates that the conference organizer shall buy a minimum number of paper copies from World Scientific, but also that the publishers shall make the proceedings available on the Web, allowing free access to all interested parties.'

Comment. Just a quick reply to Burton Richter's letter. He is assuming that OA journals have no revenue or subsidy. OA does not presuppose that journal publishing is costless. It merely looks for other ways to pay the bills than to charge readers (or their libraries) and thereby create access barriers. The question is whether there are viable OA business models in a given field, not whether a journal without resources will meet our needs.