Abstract

Rüdiger Voss
Physics Department, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics

Particle Physics, often referred to as High Energy Physics (HEP),
spearheaded the Open Access dissemination of scientific results with
the mass mailing of preprints in the pre-Web era and with the launch
of the arXiv preprint system at the dawn of the '90s. The HEP
community is now ready for a further push to Open Access while
retaining all the advantages of the peer-review system and, at the
same time, bring the spiralling cost of journal subscriptions under
control.

I will present a plan for the conversion to Open Access of HEP
peer-reviewed journals, through a consortium of HEP funding agencies,
laboratories and libraries: SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open
Access Publishing in Particle Physics). SCOAP3 will engage with
scientific publishers towards building a sustainable model for Open
Access publishing, which is as transparent as possible for HEP
authors.

The current system in which journals income comes from subscription
fees is replaced with a scheme where SCOAP3 compensates publishers
for the costs incurred to organise the peer-review service and give
Open Access to the final version of articles. SCOAP3 will be funded
by all countries active in HEP under a "fair share" scenario,
according to their production of HEP articles.

In this talk I will present a short overview of the history of Open
Access in HEP, the details of the SCOAP3 model and the outlook for
its implementation.