SCOAP3 Open Access Publishing Initiative to Go Live on 1 January 2014

Thanks to the hard work and steadfast commitment of hundreds of libraries and individuals across the globe, SCOAP3, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, will soon become a reality.  This ground-breaking initiative will make a large proportion of the formal literature in high energy physics openly accessible worldwide, through direct financial support of the peer review and publication process by libraries and funding agencies who have agreed to become SCOAP3 Partners.  The initiative has its organizational home at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research located in Geneva, Switzerland.  Publishers participating in SCOAP3 whose HEP journals will be made open access include Elsevier, Hindawi, Institute of Physics, OUP, and Springer, among others.  A press release announcing the launch can be found on the SCOAP3 website at http://scoap3.org/news/news102.html.

The UC Libraries have long supported this initiative and have recently confirmed participation in a formal memorandum of understanding (MOU) between CDL and CERN designating the University of California as a SCOAP3 Partner.  UC was the first institution in the U.S. to indicate its support for SCOAP3 through an Expression of Interest in 2008, and has continued to be an active champion as funding commitments were cultivated elsewhere in the US and around the world.

SCOAP3 relies on a unique funding model which utilizes the redirection of library licensing fees to fund article processing charges in participating journals, without requiring payments from individual authors.  License fee reductions are in the process of being finalized with the relevant publishers so that these fees can be redirected to SCOAP3.   Participation fees are fixed for the initial three-year term of the project.

CDL’s Director of Collections Ivy Anderson has been involved with SCOAP3 throughout its formative stages as a member of the Steering Committee and chair of the Technical Working Group.  Anderson has recently been elected to the newly-formed Executive Committee of SCOAP3, which will oversee the operation and further development of the initiative, including the SCOAP3 repository being established at CERN.

In addition to serving as an archival and access repository for the articles funded by SCOAP3, participating institutions will be able to obtain a feed of SCOAP3 papers authored at their institutions for ingestion into institutional repositories.  A list of U.S. members to date can be found on the SCOAP-USA website at http://www.lyrasis.org/scoap3usa.

CDL has been privileged to help to bring SCOAP3 to birth, and looks forward to assisting in its further development and engaging other stakeholders in the UC library and physics communities.   Please feel free to contact Ivy Anderson (ivy.anderson@ucop.edu) for more information.