Converting High Energy Physics Publishing from Subscription to Open Access
The Audacity of SCOAP3, Ivy Anderson, Director of Collections, California Digital Library
Introductory Note: SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) is a grand experiment. It is a new model for scholarly communication proposed by a community of scientists. Physicists interested in expanding access to their literature have designed a novel approach to garner support from individual libraries, library consortia, research institutions, and even nation states to turn a core set of journals in the high energy physics (HEP) discipline into open access publications. SCOAP3 aims to convert all HEP literature published in high-quality journals, existing and new. This operation will be facilitated by the fact that seven journals carry the large majority of the literature in the field. These journals are published by the American Physical Society (APS), SISSA-IOP, Elsevier, and Springer. Already leaders in making their science freely accessible through the e-print service arXiv, the scientists are now proposing to make a substantial portion of the published literature open access as well.
