Category Archives: oa.scoap3

SCOAP3 launches open books program – SCOAP3

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“The world’s largest disciplinary open access initiative, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³), has officially launched a new initiative to make books in particle physics and related domains fully open access, under the SCOAP³ for Books program.

Since the launch of SCOAP³ in 2014, the transition to open access for scientific articles in particle physics has progressed rapidly. Over 90% of the annually published scientific articles in High-Energy physics have been made free for both readers and authors worldwide. The SCOAP³ for Books program is the latest effort of the global collaboration to expand the content made openly available to include academic books in particle physics and neighboring disciplines (including accelerator physics, instrumentation, etc). 

Funded through the generous support of hundreds of institutions from within the collaboration, SCOAP³ has secured partnerships with leading academic publishers (including Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and World Scientific) to make over 100 textbooks and monographs fully open access as part of the SCOAP³ for Books pilot. This new collaboration includes a partnership with OAPEN, a leading open access books library and publication platform that supports SCOAP³ for Books by providing services in the areas of hosting, dissemination, digital preservation, and analytics….”

SCOAP3 reaches 50’000 articles milestone – SCOAP3

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The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3)—the world’s largest disciplinary open access initiative—has reached the milestone of over 50’000 research articles published. Through partnerships with 11 leading journals, SCOAP3 has effectively transitioned the vast majority of research articles in the discipline to perpetual OA since 2014. These research papers include vital contributions from research organizations and institutions across the world: including the last paper published by Stephen Hawking and colleagues on Black Hole Entropy and a seminal paper from the CMS and ATLAS collaborations on the measurements of the Higgs boson production and decay rates, among the many thousands of others.

CERN moves closer to achieving full open access | CERN

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“Since 2014, CERN has required that all peer-reviewed primary research articles from CERN authors are published open access (OA), i.e. freely available for anyone around the world to read and re-use with appropriate attribution. This policy reflects the moral imperative of CERN as a publicly-funded organisation – supported by contributions from its Member States – to ensure that the results of our work accrue benefits to all.

I’m pleased to report that we are close to achieving full policy compliance: in 2021, 93.7% of the 1058 publications from CERN authors were published OA. …”

New collaboration between SCOAP³ For Books and OAPEN: Open Access Books in Particle Physics | OAPEN

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“SCOAP³ – the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics – is collaborating with OAPEN as part of its latest open access book initiative. Since the introduction of SCOAP³ in 2012 under the auspices of the European Organization of Nuclear Research (CERN), the transition to open access for scientific articles in particle physics has progressed rapidly. Over 90% of the annually published scientific articles in High-Energy physics have been made free for both readers and authors worldwide.

In 2019, the SCOAP³ Governing Council approved the SCOAP³ for Books initiative to expand the content made available through the program to include academic books in particle physics and neighboring disciplines (including accelerator physics, instrumentation, etc)….”

SCOAP3 for Books pilot project started – SCOAP3

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“Since its start in 2014, SCOAP3 has successfully supported the publication of more than 35,000 articles open access across 11 of the world’s leading journals in the discipline. Thanks to the support from more than 3,000 partner libraries, research institutes and funding agencies from 43 countries, SCOAP3, has largely met its primary objective to convert all of the scientific articles in High-Energy Physics to OA.

Similar to the journal initiative, the partnership now wants to use the collective power of the SCOAP3 community to decrease the costs incurred by the key users of these texts by transitioning the content to open and enabling global free accessibility. 

After a thorough analysis performed by a community working group, established by the SCOAP3 Governing Council, a pilot was initiated for the transition of an initial set of existing books and monographs to open access.

The SCOAP3 for Books pilot aims to facilitate the conversion to open access of relevant existing books and monographs, such as university-level textbooks in HEP and related disciplines like instrumentation, detector engineering and accelerator physics. Open availability of these books will empower students, researchers, and faculty members at institutions across the world (including members of the general public) to benefit from full access to these important texts. 

The SCOAP3 Open Books Working Group has identified a list of 78 relevant titles and has tasked CERN with the procurement process to identify a service provider that can facilitate the conversion of these books to Open Access. Titles, that are not yet available in a electronic format, will be digitized as part of this initiative. The results of the procurement process are expected to be available later in summer 2020 and the first books are expected to be available open access at the beginning of 2021.”

Accelerating open science in physics | Research Information

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“Some argue there is enough money in the system to afford a transition to open access. Whether this is the case or not, there is no current solution or global plan in place to adjust the allocation and flow of funding so it resides at the levels exactly commensurate to where research is produced. These are not intractable challenges. But they require global consensus on the goal of open science, coordinated action to build the infrastructure, and incentives to create lasting change. This will take time….

Although Covid-19 might have reinforced the value of open science, its benefits are well understood by many in the physics community, and we are a long-standing proponent. But there is still much work for all involved if we are to transition to a fully and sustainably open landscape in physics and beyond.

To that end, we will maintain an open dialogue with the physical scientists and scientific organisations we serve and continue to seek more insight into what’s specifically important to them. Over the coming year we will engage in a series of projects to speak to the global physical science community so we can contribute to more open science – more ‘open physics’ – and we look forward to reporting back.”

Accelerating open science in physics | Research Information

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“Some argue there is enough money in the system to afford a transition to open access. Whether this is the case or not, there is no current solution or global plan in place to adjust the allocation and flow of funding so it resides at the levels exactly commensurate to where research is produced. These are not intractable challenges. But they require global consensus on the goal of open science, coordinated action to build the infrastructure, and incentives to create lasting change. This will take time….

Although Covid-19 might have reinforced the value of open science, its benefits are well understood by many in the physics community, and we are a long-standing proponent. But there is still much work for all involved if we are to transition to a fully and sustainably open landscape in physics and beyond.

To that end, we will maintain an open dialogue with the physical scientists and scientific organisations we serve and continue to seek more insight into what’s specifically important to them. Over the coming year we will engage in a series of projects to speak to the global physical science community so we can contribute to more open science – more ‘open physics’ – and we look forward to reporting back.”

Fair OA publishers, infrastructures and initiatives supported by KU Leuven | KU Leuven Open Science

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KU Leuven promotes non-commercial and community-owned approaches of OA, especially through the KU Leuven Fund for Fair OA. On the one hand, the fund supports innovative publishing initiatives and infrastructures. On the other hand, the fund covers membership costs for consortia and advocacy organizations focusing on a non-commercial approach to scholarly communication. On this page you can find an overview of everything that KU Leuven endorses.

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Establishing tender procedures and competition within the framework of national library consortia for open access journals | National Contact Point Open Access OA2020-DE

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“The open access transformation is a declared goal of the Coalition S and the OA2020 initiative and the institutions supporting them. In order to achieve a large-scale open access transformation of journals, as many established subscription journals as possible shall be transformed into open access. To achieve this goal, transformative agreements are concluded such as those the DEAL project has been negotiating for several years with the three major international scientific publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley). In Germany, the 13+ group established by the “Alliance of Science Organisations” Working Group “Scientific Publication System” is aiming at similar negotiations with further thirteen large publishing houses. In addition, the DFG programme “Open Access Transformation Agreements” provides funding for transformative agreements.

The existing transformative agreements do not include mechanisms for the definitive flipping of journals into open access and no mechanisms to limit cost increases in the long term, as demanded by the European Commission and the European University Association, for example. Indeed, APC-based, genuine open access journals also lack mechanisms for the long-term limitation of cost increases. The price caps currently implemented in the (DFG-funded) publication funds are of limited suitability. On the one hand, they are too high for the mass of open access journals; on the other hand, they are set too low for highly selective and high-quality open access journals that are attractive to many researchers.

Against this background, we suggest to conclude pure open access contracts and, if applicable, contract components for pure open access journals within the framework of transformative agreements by tendering in secret bidding procedures as practiced by SCOAP³. The now published concept describes the intended objectives, the services to be put out to tender and a proposal for organisational implementation.

The following points summarise the objectives of the concept:

Establishing price and service competition between publishers by means of centralised tendering.
Reduction of the average article costs for consortia within the framework of open access contracts to the level of SCOAP³.
Clear definition of the services to be provided by the publishers.
Structural anchoring of APC funding for affiliated scientists….”

L+H in Anthropology, v2.0 – Google Docs

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“In its simplest terms and inspired by growing research funder commitment to open access (see Plan S), Libraria is proposing a Library+Funder (L+F) model that first of all harnesses the Gates Foundation’s strategy, in which the research funder pays the publisher directly for the cost of publishing the research it has supported. It then combines Gates’ direct-payment strategy with the success of SCOAP3, Open Library of Humanities, and Knowledge Unlatched in soliciting broadly based library support for sustaining open access journals.

To enable anthropology journals to convert from subscriptions to open access under this proposed L+F model, funding agencies that support the research published in the journals would be asked to cover their share of the publishers’ revenue which was previously derived from subscriptions. In addition, the libraries subscribing to the journals undergoing this conversion would be asked to cover the remainder of the revenue needed to replace the money previously collected through subscriptions. In the case of the 21 anthropology journals that we have examined thus far (data), funders have sponsored the work of roughly a quarter of the items published, which leaves the libraries to cover the other three-quarters. If only the leading funders participate in the initial roll out of the model, which seems like a reasonable starting point, their share would be smaller but the libraries would still pay less than they would for a subscription (with more of the details below).…”

At MIT anthropologists plan a model for Open Access

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“Publishers, librarians, research funders, and leaders from across the field of anthropology — including journal editors and representatives of the major Anglophone anthropological societies of both Europe and North America — gathered at MIT on April 24, 2019 for an invitational workshop focused on a sea change for everyone who attended: moving the discipline’s journals to an Open-Access (OA) model.

 
Currently, the expense of academic publishing creates significant barriers to the broad dissemination of scholarly findings. The goal of the workshop was to consider a new model for providing open access to journal publications in a way that could transform both anthropology and a full range of academic disciplines….”

At MIT anthropologists plan a model for Open Access

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“Publishers, librarians, research funders, and leaders from across the field of anthropology — including journal editors and representatives of the major Anglophone anthropological societies of both Europe and North America — gathered at MIT on April 24, 2019 for an invitational workshop focused on a sea change for everyone who attended: moving the discipline’s journals to an Open-Access (OA) model.

 
Currently, the expense of academic publishing creates significant barriers to the broad dissemination of scholarly findings. The goal of the workshop was to consider a new model for providing open access to journal publications in a way that could transform both anthropology and a full range of academic disciplines….”

If Research Libraries and Funders Finance Open Access: Moving Beyond Subscriptions and APCs | Willinsky | College & Research Libraries

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Abstract:  Following the examples of SCOAP3, in which libraries fund open access, and eLife, in which funding agencies have begun to directly fund open access scholarly publishing, this study presents an analysis of how creatively combining these two models might provide a means to move toward universal open access (without APCs). This study calculates the publishing costs for the funders that sponsor the research and for the libraries that cover unsponsored articles for two nonprofit biomedical publishers, eLife and PLOS, and the nonprofit journal aggregator BioOne. These entities represent a mix of publishing revenue models, including funder sponsorship, article processing charges (APC), and subscription fees. Using PubMed filtering and manual-sampling strategies, as well as publicly available publisher revenue data, the study found that, in 2015, 86 percent of the articles in eLife and PLOS acknowledge funder support, as do 76 percent of the articles in the largely subscription journals of BioOne. Such findings can inform libraries and funding agencies, as well as publishers, in their consideration of a direct-payment open access model, as the study (a) demonstrates the cost breakdown for funder and library support for open access among this sample of X articles; (b) posits how publishing data-management organizations such as Crossref and ORCID can facilitate such a model of funder and library per-article open access payments; and (c) proposes ways in which such a model offers a more efficient, equitable, and scalable approach to open access across the disciplines than the prevailing APC model, which originated with biomedical publishing.