The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) has announced that two thousand Open Access articles have been published with SCOAP3 funding since January 2014 in 10 journals from 11 publishers and learned societies. These articles are released under a CC-BY license, and openly accessible on publishers websites. In addition, articles are also immediately available on the SCOAP3 repository at repo.scoap3.org in several formats, including PDF/A and XML for text-mining and other purposes. Scientists from over 80 countries have freely published in SCOAP3 journals so far.
This large-scale Open Access operation is made possible by thousands of libraries in 35 countries, in partnership with funding agencies and research organisations. Publishers of subscriptions journals which converted to SCOAP3 are refunding all of their customers worldwide.
Participating libraries redirect these funds to SCOAP3 to pay the reduced Article Publication Charges arranged through its tendering process. Thanks to SCOAP3, authors worldwide, pay no publication fees to fully enjoy the advantages of 'gold' Open Access, without modifying their publishing practices.
Now in full operation, SCOAP3 demonstrates how a tripartite collaboration between the library community, funding agencies and the publishing industry can achieve a seamless transition to Open Access for the global scientific community.
