Public Lecture on Tuesday 8 July

[Suzie Radosic]

___________________

PUBLIC LECTURE
___________________

Tuesday, 8 July 2008, 11 a.m.
Kastler Lecture Hall, Adriatico Guesthouse

Jens Vigen (CERN)

"SCOAP3: CERN Consortia for open access"

Abstract:

The High-Energy Physics (HEP) community spearheaded Open Access with  
over half a century of dissemination of pre-prints, culminating in  
the arXiv system. It is now proposing an Open Access publishing model  
which goes beyond present, sometimes controversial, proposals, with a  
novel practical approach: the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access  
Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3). In this model, libraries and  
research institutions federate to explicitly cover the costs of the  
peer-review and other editorial services, rather than implicitly  
supporting them via journal subscriptions. Rather than through  
subscriptions, journals will their costs from SCOAP3 and make the  
electronic versions of their journals free to read. Unlike many  
“author-pays” Open Access models, authors are not directly charged to  
publish their articles in the Open Access paradigm. Contributions to  
the SCOAP3 consortium are determined on a country-by-country basis,  
according to the volume of HEP publications originating from each  
country. They would come from nation-wide re-directions of current  
subscriptions to HEP journals. SCOAP3 will negotiate with publishers  
in the field the price of their peer review services through a  
tendering process. Journals converted to Open Access will be then  
decoupled from package licenses. The global yearly budget envelope  
for this transition is estimated at about 10 Million Euros. This  
unique experiment of “flipping” from Toll Access to Open Access all  
journals covering the literature in a given subject is rapidly  
gaining momentum, and about a third of the required budget envelope  
has already been pledged by leading libraries, library consortia and  
High-Energy Physics funding agencies worldwide. This conference paper  
describes the HEP publication landscape and the bibliometric studies  
at the basis of the SCOAP3 model. Details of the model are provided  
and the status of the initiative is presented, debriefing the lessons  
learned in this attempt to achieve a large-scale conversion of an  
entire field to Open Access.