The Open Access movement is transforming scholarly publishing and forging new relationships between scholars, publishers, libraries, and researchers. SCOAP3 offers a leading example of these transformations. The goal of SCOAP3 is to make publications in High-Energy Physics freely available to readers worldwide without undermining publishers’ financial incentives.
SCOAP3 stands for the “Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics.” The SCOAP3 initiative will provide open access to major peer-reviewed journals in the field of High-Energy Physics, including Advances in High Energy Physics, Journal of High Energy Physics, Physics Letters B, and Progress of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, among others.
The consortium was founded at CERN in Switzerland and has a growing international membership. The Vanderbilt University Library recently joined SCOAP3. Vanderbilt and other members of the consortium will redirect their subscription fees for journals participating in SCOAP3. The cost publishers incur during the peer-review, editing, and publication process will be subsidized by this central fund. As a result, articles published in SCOAP3 journals will be freely accessible to physicists and other researchers worldwide.
What effect will Vanderbilt’s membership in SCOAP3 have on our existing library information channels? The short answer is there will be no noticeable difference to our campus research community, apart from their ability to share articles freely with colleagues at other institutions. Nancy Godleski, Assistant Dean for Collections, and Julie Loder, Electronic Resources Librarian, have coordinated the process of redirecting our subscription fees to CERN and have assured that participation in the program will not incur additional costs.
SCOAP3 represents an innovative model for Open Access and a portent of transformations to come in the world of scholarly publishing.
Questions? Please contact Clifford Anderson, Director for Scholarly Communications in the University Library, by email at clifford.anderson@vanderbilt.edu