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Uncategorized Tuesday, September 25th 2012 at 9:40 am

Score One for Science: Entire Field of Particle Physics Slowly Switching to Open-Access Publishing

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The way in which peer-reviewed scientific papers currently get published and distributed is nonsensical. Rather than providing this knowledge to the masses in order to breed further understanding and innovation, the specifics of breakthroughs are often locked behind subscriptions and other monetary systems. Thanks to CERN and the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, the field of particle physics will soon see the majority of their scientific discoveries made free to the public.

This isn’t something that happened overnight, though. The consortium has been negotiating this deal for six years, and the field just so happens to be rather concentrated and thus easily consolidated around the idea of open access. This kind of deal will be much harder to score in more disparate fields, like biology or any of its various subsections, because of how many variables enter into the equation.

In order to previously score open-access publishing deals for particle physics research, individual groups had to sign piecemeal agreements. This kind of deal could even vary between different journals, making the whole process a nightmare with which to deal. As of now, the consortium has managed to come to an agreement with 12 different journals, meaning that 90% of particle physics publications will be free to access from the start.

The idea here is to switch to open access without disrupting the rest of the fragile funding ecosystem. Research grants and the like should continue functioning as usual, but now thousands of publications that might have been locked behind an archaic model of distribution will be more easily accessed. We could all use a bit more science in our lives, after all.

(Nature via Hacker News, image via CERN)

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  • http://blog.coatesism.com/ Shaun M Coates

    I wonder how much Colleges and Universities can save by not paying for these subscriptions. Probably just a drop in the bucket, but I am sure that money could go towards other resources.

  • http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/ Stevan Harnad

    SCOAP3 “MEMBERSHIP”: UNNECESSARY, PREMATURE, UNSCALABLE & UNSUSTAINABLE

    1. High Energy Physics already has close to 100% Open Access (OA): Authors have been self-archiving their articles in Arxiv (both before and after peer review) since 1991 (“Green OA”).

    2. Hence SCOAP3 is just substituting the payment of consortial “membership” fees for outgoing articles in place of the payment of individual institutional subscription fees for incoming articles in exchange for an OA from its publisher (“Gold OA”) that it already had from self-archiving (Green OA).

    3. As such, SCOAP3 is just a consortial subscription fee negotiation, except that it is inherently unstable, because once all journal content is open access, non-members are free-riders, and members can cancel if they feel a budget crunch.

    4. Nor does membership scale to other disciplines.

    5. High Energy Physics would have done global Open Access a better service if it had put its full weight behind promoting mandates to self-archive by institutions and research funders in all other disciplines.

    6. The time to convert to Gold OA is when mandatory Green OA prevails globally across all disciplines and institutions.

    7. Institutions can then cancel subscriptions and pay for peer review service alone, per individual paper, out of a portion of the windfall cancelation savings, instead of en bloc, in an unstable (and overpriced) consortial “membership.”