ACRL supports SCOAP³: a podcast interview with John Ober, Director of Policy, Planning & Outreach at California Digital Library, and Kim Douglas, University Librarian at California Institute of Technology. John Ober is a current co-chair, and Kim Douglas an incoming co-chair, of ACRL’s Scholarly Communications Committee.

Open access via des partenariats (memberships), Coordination documentaire des bibliothèques universitaires lausannoises.

Hidden cost of open access, Philip Altbach, published in Times Higher Education, 5 June 2008. Please read the comment from Owen Stephens, 5 June 2008.

Open Access Konsortien, Konzepte und Erfahrungen, presentation from Dr. Jochen Johannsen during the Bibliothekartag held in Manhein, June 03, 2008.

Julia Blixrud, Assistant Executive Director, External Relations, ARL, and Assistant Director, Public Programs, SPARC:

"To move the SCOAP³ project forward, libraries and consortia can take the following steps:

1. review the Report of the SCOAP³ Working Party, available from http://www.scoap3.org/;
2. calculate the amount of their pledge to SCOAP³ by estimating their current expenditures on seven HEP core journals, as outlined at http://scoap3.org/whichjournals.html;
3. sign the expression of interest to join SCOAP³ at http://www.scoap3.org/scoap3us.html"

The Strategic Helmholtz Alliance 'Physics at the Terascale' considers unrestricted access to published scientific results essential for wide dissemination and efficient usage of scientific knowledge.
"The particle physics community has always been at the forefront of the open access movement. Today, the overwhelming majority of scientific results in high energy physics are freely available as eprints on institutional or subject repositories like arXiv.org, but often not in their final published form. Journals still play and will continue to play, via their peer-review system, a crucial role in the quality assurance of research results. However, access to the final journal versions gets more and more restricted, especially for scientists at small institutions, due to spiraling subscription costs which force libraries to cancel subscriptions even to important journals.
The SCOAP³ initiative proposes a new business model for scientific publishing, with the goal of extending open-access to the bulk of peer-reviewed particle physics literature. An international consortium of funding agencies, libraries and research institutions aims to convert prestigious peer-reviewed journals to open access in a way transparent to authors, at the same time being open for any new high-quality particle physics journal. Publication costs will be centrally borne by the consortium and will be shared according to the respective number of journal articles of its member countries.
The Management Board of the Helmholtz Alliance 'Physics at the Terascale' fully supports the goal of SCOAP³ of free and unrestricted electronic access to peer-reviewed journal literature in particle physics. We are convinced that the proposed fair-share business model will promote a healthy and dynamic market and will benefit scientists, authors, funding agencies and publishers alike. We therefore invite all partners in the Helmholtz Alliance to actively support the SCOAP³ initiative, facilitate the large-scale transition to open-access in particle physics by raising awareness on open- access publishing in their communities and encourage their authors to publish in open-access journals."
The Strategic Helmholtz Alliance 'Physics at the Terascale' is a structured German network comprising 17 universities, 2 Helmholtz institutes and 1 Max Planck institute. It comprises experimental and theoretical physicists addressing the fundamental questions of particle physics, distributed computing, novel detector development and accelerator science.
Read the statement on Terascale website

The Danish Library Agency is pleased to announce that it has signed an Expression of Interest to join SCOAP³.
The Danish Library Agency hosts the secretariat of Denmark's Electronic Research Library (DEFF). DEFF is an organisational and technological partnership between research libraries co-financed by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Education. DEFF's purpose is to advance the development of an electronic research library network making the libraries’ electronic and other information resources available to patrons in a coherent and simple way.
DEFF has been closely monitoring the development of Open Access from its birth and is active in advocating Open Access solutions and carrying out pilot projects. The invitation to the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation to join SCOAP³ was discussed by the ministries in DEFF’s Coordination Committee and on Tuesday 18 December 2007 they approved the signing of the Expression of Interest.
DEFF considers a wider access to scientific information as an important pillar for the Danish Government’s strategy ‘Denmark in the Global Economy’.
Bo Öhrström, Deputy Director, Danish Library Agency
Read the statement from the Danish Library Agency
Read the statement from DEFF

17 December 2007. The LANL Research Library has joined several libraries in the US and internationally in expressing support for the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³). SCOAP³ aims to make articles in selected high energy physics (HEP) journals free to read for everyone. It is a proposed mechanism for a field of science (in this case particle physics) to pay for its own publishing costs, rather than make the readers of its journals pay via subscriptions or authors pay via author fees. The high energy physics (HEP) community essentially pioneered open access (OA), through repositories such as the xxx.lanl.gov physics archive (which started originally at LANL, and is now the arXiv.org preprint server), the CERN preprint document server, SLAC Spires, etc. It is this same HEP community that is pioneering SCOAP³. The LANL Research Library is supporting SCOAP³, both as a member of the HEP community and a proponent of open access principles.
Read the complete press release

11 December 2007. UC Berkeley finds the consortial funding model of SCOAP³ both intriguing and innovative. "We are very impressed with the thoroughness of the proposal as well as the level of support that SCOAP³ has been able to garner in Europe to date. Any proposal that holds out promise for placing scholarly publishing on a more sustainable and open footing is a welcome development. We join other US libraries and laboratories who have expressed their intent to fully explore SCOAP³'s potential for broadening the realm of content available free of access restrictions to the scholarly community in the area of high energy physics. We will be working closely with our sister campuses in the UC and the California Digital Library on this issue."

December 2007, Peter Suber Predictions for 2008 : "We'll see more initiatives expressly designed to redirect money from subscriptions for toll-access (TA) journals to publication fees or subsidies for open access (OA) journals. Some will be multi-party negotiations, like the [...] SCOAP³ (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) project. [...] As [SCOAP³] makes further progress in signing up stakeholders, raising money, and converting journals, it will exert a gravitational tug on other fields, where it will be admired as much for its constructive cooperation as for its effectiveness. Different organizations in different fields will take it up and try to adapt it to their peculiar local circumstances. University and library consortia will work with selected journals to convert them to OA and use the savings to pay subsidies or publication fees. Some universities will create funds specifically to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journal, and feed the fund, in part, with the savings from journal cancellations. Universities concerned to preserve peer review will pledge some portion of the savings from TA journal cancellations to support peer-reviewed OA alternatives."

November 2007, the Swedish Royal Library states support for SCOAP³ on its website: "The Royal Library centrally coordinates access to databases of articles, and also operates the program OpenAccess.se which advocates free access to scientific results on the Internet. The agreements for database access are negotiated centrally for a consortium of Swedish research libraries. All institutional libraries of the organizations involved in particle physics research have expressed their interest in participating in SCOAP³. The participating libraries will redirect money from their subscription budgets to finance their participation in the project. The Royal Library guarantees that any potentially missing funds will be covered, to ensure a complete Swedish contribution to SCOAP³."

Closing address (video) of the Portuguese Minister of Science, Professor Mariano Gago, during the Berlin 5 Open Access conference, in Padua, September 21, 2007.

On 15th August 2007, ICFA, the International Committee for Future Accelerators, a major forum for future directions in High-Energy Physics, encourages concerned parties from all world regions to become actively involved in the SCOAP³ initiative to assure its success. ICFA also invites its members to facilitate the implementation of SCOAP³ by raising awareness on open-access publishing in their communities.
Read the statement.