Free for all: Dream Come True

As a lay person involved and very interested in the research that in going on in science, anything that speaks to the "openness of science" which will allow me to get information that is not third hand, is a wonderful thing for me.

Even among supportive publishers, there is a fear that the transition to open access could be rough, and might even put them out of business.

Yes indeed, it could change the landscape on magazines, or, it could involve a greater research department to science editing, that will bring a science editors work to a level the public can understand. This is a wonderful aspect of the openness of the internet that I have been after and have sought for a long time.

I have followed blogs who have held this virtue for the publics benefit in helping the public with this responsibility of awareness.

Illustration by Sandbox Studio

Forget about paying for journal subscriptions. If a new proposal takes hold, particle physics journals would get their funding from labs, libraries, and agencies that sponsor research, and readers could peruse them for free.

Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics(SCOAP3)

The Open Access (OA) tenets of granting unrestricted access to the results of publicly-funded research are in contrast with current models of scientific publishing, where access is restricted to journal customers. At the same time, subscription costs increase and add considerable strain on libraries, forced to cancel an increasing number of journals subscriptions. This situation is particularly acute in fields like High-Energy Physics (HEP), where pre-prints describing scientific results are timely available online. There is a growing concern within the academic community that the future of high-quality journals, and the peer-review system they administer, is at risk.

To address this situation for HEP and, as an experiment, Science at large, a new model for OA publishing has emerged: SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics). In this model, HEP funding agencies and libraries, which today purchase journal subscriptions to implicitly support the peer-review service, federate to explicitly cover its cost, while publishers make the electronic versions of their journals free to read. Authors are not directly charged to publish their articles OA.

SCOAP3 will, for the first time, link quality and price, stimulating competition and enabling considerable medium- and long-term savings. Today, 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/year, sensibly lower than the estimated global expenditure in subscription to HEP journals.

Each SCOAP3 partner will finance its contribution by canceling journal subscriptions. Each country will contribute according to its share of HEP publishing. The transition to OA will be facilitated by the fact that the large majority of HEP articles are published in just six peer-reviewed journals. Of course, the SCOAP3 model is open to any, present or future, high-quality HEP journal, aiming for a dynamic market with healthy competition and a broader choice.

HEP funding agencies and libraries are currently signing Expressions of Interest for the financial backing of the consortium. A tendering procedure will then take place. Provided that SCOAP3 funding partners are ready to engage in long-term commitments, many publishers are expected to be ready to enter into negotiations.

The example of SCOAP3 could be rapidly followed by other fields, directly related to HEP, such as nuclear physics or astro-particle physics, or similarly compact and organized with a reasonable number of journals.