Australia has joined SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics), an international consortium that aims to provide free access to major particle physics journals worldwide. Six of the Group of Eight universities in Australia have agreed to participate in the consortium. These include Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Western Australia, New South Wales and the Australian National University. The partnership will be coordinated by the University of Melbourne.
SCOAP3 members include high-energy physics funding agencies and laboratories, national and international libraries and library consortiums. They represent the US, 12 countries in Europe and the multinational European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) - and now, Australia.
With the accession of Australia, SCOAP3 has received pledges for one-third of its budget. Once it is fully subscribed, SCOAP3 will make a tender offer to the current publishers of high-energy physics journals. The publishers would be guaranteed operating money to cover the cost of editorial work. In return, the publishers would make the journals freely available.
With increasingly powerful IT and communication technologies, the pace of discovery in high-energy physics has increased immensely. Communication among researchers occurs mainly through arXiv.org, an open access repository of working papers and pre-print versions of articles. With arXiv, researchers can learn about new discoveries within 24 hours. However, the top refereed journals remain essential to the scholarly communication process. The peer-review process helps to ensure the quality of published scholarly work. A small number of the journals are used in measuring research performance.
SCOAP3 partners hope to ensure that the top peer-reviewed journals maintain their integrity while remaining financially viable. Each SCOAP3 member country will contribute according to its share of high-energy physics publishing. Allowances are made for developing countries that are unable to pay their share.
SCOAP3 members include: CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, Swedish National Library, Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions, several German institutions including the Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron and the Max Planck Society, University of California, Fermilab, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, and California Institute of Technology.
