Particle Physicists Strike a Golden Open Access Deal. (September 25, 2012)

On the face of it, it looks to be a sweet deal for those producing for profit scientific journals in particle physics. For a start the open access preprint server arXiv makes available the vast majority of papers in the field prior to publication (not peer reviewed), with the peer-reviewed versions later published in subscription journals, but a researcher submitting to arXiv automatically has his/her peers reading and assessing what's made available on arXiv.

What the particle physics community has negotiated -- the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³) -- is a shifting of funds transfer from those subscribing to the scientific journals (e.g. individual university libraries) and individuals downloading specific articles.

According to Salvatore Mele, who leads the SCOAP³ project from CERN, the goal of SCOAP³ is to switch the discipline's journals to open access without researchers noticing any effect on their grant funding or on the way they publish papers. The SCOAP³ consortium will pay the contracts from an annual budget of €10 million, which it is claimed will be funded by pledges from more than a thousand libraries, funding agencies and research consortia across the world. In effect, existing journal subscription fees are still being taking from tax payers pockets, it's just that the pair of trousers will have changed, and in all probability journal profitability will hardly be affected. This is just what those supporting the green standard are railing against, claiming the journals are basking in excess profits.

Whether or not this form of golden open access will catch on in other fields where negotiations with publishers could be far more protracted is a moot question. The consortium reached agreement with 12 journals which it estimates will result in 90% of high-energy-physics papers beginning in 2014 becoming freely available.

The table below summarises the negotiations between SCOAP³ and the publishers.

Source: http//scoap3.org/news/news95.html