A consortium facilitates Open Access publishing in High Energy Physics by re-directing subscription money. This answers the request of the High Energy Physics community.
Today: (funding bodies through) libraries buy journal subscriptions to support the peer-review service and allow their patrons to read articles.
Tomorrow: funding bodies and libraries contribute to the consortium, which pays centrally for the peer-review service. Articles are free to read for everyone.
Read now:
-The Executive
Summary of the Report of the SCOAP3
Working Party
-The complete report
05/08/2010, Japanese physicists support SCOAP3
KEK, the Japanese High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, has issued a statement of support for SCOAP3:
KEK strongly supports the spirit of the SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing) project for its comprehensive approach to Open Access, taking into considerations that the price of journals has been rising and stays at the very expensive standard, so that the universities and institutes face difficulty to secure the budget for subscriptions. KEK endorses the role of journals as the possible place of the publication for variety of researchers in many areas of the world, various generations of researchers and variety of scientific ideas.
Based on this course, KEK has been striving to consolidate the publication system of the Japanese physical journals toward the full open access. It is crucial for KEK to make an alliance with CERN for paving the way of new paradigms for the distribution of the knowledge of physics, and for opening to the SCOAP3 initiative.
The support of the Japanese physics community for SCOAP3 is very important, giving the initiative a truly global flavour across Asia, America and Europe.
Researchers worldwide support this initiative, and the first results of the LHC experiments are already appearing Open Access and under Creative Common licenses in leading journals in the field (see here and here).
02/07/2010, CERN/SCOAP3 is awarded the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications
Today CERN/SCOAP3 was presented the fifth SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications
Rolf Heuer, CERN Director General, said: “I am honoured by this prize which recognises our vision of Scholarly Communication. It is inspired by the same principles that our community has developed to tackle global scientific challenges: collaboration; consensus; innovation; openness; technology transfer and Open Access to knowledge".
These principles are indeed embodied by SCOAP3, which is built on consensus and partnership: among scientists, who clearly stated their support and need for Open Access ; among hundreds of libraries from 24 countries , who pledged support to the initiative; among leading publishers in the field, who demonstrate willingness to engage with these principles and published the first LHC physics results Open Access under Creative Common licences.
