Open access publishing initiative for physics

An international consortium of libraries and funding agencies has announced an innovative new model to achieve open access to peer-reviewed literature in high-energy physics.

Through a long period of consultation and a tendering process led by CERN, the global SCOAP³ (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access in Particle Physics Publishing) has arranged for high-energy physics articles in key journals to be converted to open access, available under a CC-BY licence.

Based on a complex economic model, the SCOAP³ partners will make central payments to cover the costs of peer review and publishing so that there is no article processing charge for authors. Depending on the journal, either all articles will be open access, or a percentage will be OA (those categorised as high-energy physics in ArXiv) with subscription costs reduced for the consortium partners. Over 20 countries are involved in the partnership, with the UK represented by JISC Collections.

The journals included in the initiative include Physics Letters B (Elsevier), New Journal of Physics (IoP) and the European Physical Journal C (Springer)

The SCOAP³ intiative will start in January 2014 and a dedicated repository will be launched to provide full text access to the articles. More details are available at http://scoap3.org/