Wednesday, May 16, 2007

SCOAP3 Progress Towards Open Access Publishing in High Energy Physics

The SCOAP3 Working Party, Towards Open Access Publishing in High Energy Physics Report of the SCOAP3 Working Party, CERN, April 19, 2007 (but released today)

CERN and its library, led by library director Jens Vigen, is helping to lead the effort to coordinate a move to full open access publishing in high energy physics (HEP), through a consortium of purchasers and publishers.

This initiative is noteworthy in many respects. For example, economic analysis has determined that the annual budget required for full OA publishing for HEP would be no more than a maximum of 10 million Euros per year; about what the 500 purchasing members of the consortium would pay in subscriptions for about 2 journals.

Peter Suber comments:


We're watching a massive transition to OA in process. This is not only the first project to convert all the TA journals in a field to OA; it's also succeeding. It's succeeding in pulling together the needed stakeholders and it's succeeding in raising the money. It's also succeeding in showing that the final result will cost the stakeholders less than the current system.

OA advocates have always argued that funding OA doesn't require new money, just a redirection of the money now spent on subscriptions....What's most significant about the CERN project is that it's a large-scale, discipline-wide, stakeholder-united redirection project.

Finally, CERN is on track to accomplish this feat with fusion, not fissionor with cooperation and comity all around rather than antagonism and division.

For more details, see Open Access News

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