HEP open access initiative at crucial juncture | symmetry magazine

Representatives from two dozen nations met today at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, to officially launch the next phase of the SCOAP3 project, which aims to make all published literature in the field of high-energy physics available to readers for free. As reported last week in Nature News, the SCOAP3 consortium has released information on bids from the publishers of 12 scientific journals. The journals range from the American Physical Society’s Physical Review D, which published nearly 3000 HEP papers last year, to Chinese Physics C, with just 16 papers. Between them, these journals publish 90 percent of the papers in the field. The bids stated how much each journal would charge the SCOAP3 consortium per open-access article published during a three-year period from 2014-2016. The cost would be covered by thousands of libraries, funding agencies and research institutions in the SCOAP3 consortium, which would pay into a central fund administered at CERN. As part of their contracts, the journals would lower their subscription prices in rough proportion to the amount of open-access content they provide. Today’s meeting laid out what happens next, setting the stage for a push to build the networks and sign the agreements needed to put the first field-wide open access system in place by January 2014. It’s a win-win situation for everyone, said Salvatore Mele from CERN, a physicist involved with the project since its inception in 2007 and leader of an international steering group. Readers will have free access to high-quality research results that have been vetted by experts; libraries will pay a set fee per year, without having to worry about annual increases in journal subscription rates; and publishers will get paid for the value they add through the peer-review process. In the United States, the list of members includes nine US Department of Energy national laboratories and the California Digital Library, which represents 10 University of California campuses; you can see the full list here. The consortium now has partners in 29 countries, Mele said, and is in active discussions with potential partners in a few more.  Depending on how you look at it, particle physics seems like either the perfect field or the least perfect field in which to test such a broad-based open access initiative. As described in this 2007 symmetry feature on SCOAP3, most of what is new in particle physics is immediately posted on the arXiv preprint server, published or not, and available for free... So why subscribe to journals when results are freely available? Because by putting articles through peer review and rigorous editing, journals weed out questionable results and, ideally, ensure the quality of published papers... The beauty and the logic of launching an open-access initiative in high-energy physics, Mele said Friday, 'is that you know what you are paying for'—not for the dissemination of research results, which is already provided by arXiv, but for the peer review needed to ensure the quality of those results... However, SCOAP3 is far from a done deal. There’s a lot of work to be done in the 14 months before the initiative is scheduled to start.  So far the consortium has received expressions of interest that cover about 85 percent of the €10 million per year needed to carry out the open access plan. SCOAP3 will now have to turn those into signed agreements with a few dozen entities that represent thousands of individual contributors.  And for that to happen, the publishers and SCOAP3 will first have to reach agreement with those entities on how much subscriptions should be reduced.  This is more complicated than it sounds, said Joe Serene, treasurer and publisher at the American Physical Society, who has been cautiously supportive of the open access initiative..."