It has been announced that the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has joined SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics), which offers a new model of open access (OA) publishing. Under this model, funding agencies and libraries cover authors' publication payments to support journals' peer review and editorial services while publishers make the electronic OA versions of those journals without charging a subscription.
High energy physics (HEP) is an area in which it is thought this model might be particularly successful, a discipline in which a culture of pre-prints (pre-publication online outputs) is predominant. Each partner finances its contribution by cancelling journal subscriptions and each country contributes according to its share of HEP publishing.
JISC has joined SCOAP3 on behalf of UK Higher Education Institutions who have pledged to re-direct their current expenditures on HEP journals to this OA initiative.
With JISC, SCOAP3 now counts partners from 14 countries in Europe and Oceania, as well as an international organisation and a number of institutes in the US. In total, these partners have pledged 37.4 per cent of the SCOAP3 budget envelope, corresponding to €
3.7 million.
