Open Access News

Jens Vigen, Particle physicists push for publishing changes, Research Information, October/November 2007.  Excerpt:

Over the last 15 years the high-energy physics (HEP) community has achieved what is known as full green open access. This means that there is a wide dissemination of preprints of HEP articles via arXiv, a central subject repository managed by Cornell University. However, although green open access gives free access to the papers that are written, it does not alleviate the economic difficulties for libraries. They are still expected to offer access to the final published versions of the peer-reviewed literature so they still need to pay for subscriptions....

For these reasons, the particle-physics community is now aiming for gold open access.  In this model, all the final published versions are freely accessible to everybody at anytime. A working party is now working to bring together funding agencies, laboratories and libraries into a single consortium, called SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics). This consortium will engage with publishers towards building a sustainable model for open-access publishing.  The origins of this initiative go back to December 2005 when a tripartite Task Force, comprising funding agencies, publishers and research organisations, was set up to study the possibilities for open-access (OA) publishing in HEP. Its main conclusion was that a model whereby the costs of publishing were paid globally rather than on an article-by-article basis was the most appropriate.

It is interesting to observe that in the past few years all physics publishers have introduced OA options of one kind or another....

However, in spite of the fact that 90 per cent of the HEP articles published today in principle could have been published as OA, only a very small fraction of authors actually have the opportunity to choose this option. This is due to the fact that no funding mechanisms so far are put in place to cover the corresponding publication fees....

So how will SCOAP3’s alternative work? The proposed initiative aims to convert high-quality HEP journals to OA.

In this new model, the publishers’ subscription income from multiple institutions is replaced by income from a single financial partner, the ‘Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics’ (SCOAP3).  SCOAP3 is a global network of HEP funding agencies, research laboratories, and libraries. Each SCOAP3 partner will recover its contribution from the cancellation of its current journal subscriptions. This model avoids the obvious disadvantage of many current OA models in which authors are directly charged for the OA publication of their articles.

The price of an electronic journal is mainly driven by the costs of running the peer-review system and editorial processing. Most publishers quote a price in the range of 1,000–2,000 euros per published article. On this basis, we estimate that the annual budget for the transition of HEP publishing to OA would amount to a maximum of 10 million euros per year. In comparison, the annual list-price of a single ‘core’ HEP journal today can be as high as 10,000 euros; for 500 institutes worldwide actively involved in HEP, this represents an annual expenditure of five million Euros – and that is just for one core journal....

An allowance of not more than 10 per cent of the SCOAP3 budget is foreseen to cover publications from scientists from countries that cannot be reasonably expected to contribute to the consortium at this time.

In practice, the OA transition will be facilitated by the fact that the large majority of HEP articles are published in just six peer-reviewed journals from four publishers. Five of those six journals carry a majority of HEP content....

Leading funding agencies and library consortia are currently signing an Expression of Interest for the financial backing of the consortium.  Once sufficient momentum is gained, the tendering procedure will take place determining the exact budget envelope. A Memorandum of Understanding detailing the financial contribution of each country and the governance of SCOAP3 will then be signed. Contracts will then be established with publishers in order to make OA publishing in high-energy physics a reality in 2008....