The MU Libraries, as part of the Greater Western Library Alliance, recently joined partners from 24 countries and over 1,000 libraries, library consortia and research organizations in becoming a member of the international collaboration, Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access in Particle Physics Publishing (SCOAP3), an open access initiative convened at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) on January 1, 2014. With the support of these partners, many scientific articles in the field of High-Energy Physics (HEP) will become Open Access at no cost for any author: everyone will be able to read them; authors will retain copyright; and generous licenses will enable wide re-use of this information.
Eleven publishers of high quality international journals, including Elsevier and Springer, are participating in SCOAP3. Reductions in subscription fees for participating libraries will make funds available for libraries to support SCOAP3. The MU Libraries maintains subscriptions that entitle MU researchers access to many of these journals. Through its participation in the initiative, the MU Libraries will shift funding from subscriptions to these journals to financial support of the SCOAP3 initiative.
The objective of SCOAP3 is to grant unrestricted access to scientific articles appearing in scientific journals. In the SCOAP3 model, libraries and funding agencies pool resources currently used to subscribe to journals, in co-operation with publishers, and use them to support the peer-review system directly instead.
“SCOAP3 is an exciting initiative, and we are proud at the MU Libraries to be a part of it. We are committed to Open Access publishing and believe that this new model has the potential to help control the increases in journal subscription costs,” said Ann Campion Riley, associate director of access, collections and technical services.
For more information about SCOAP3, visit http://scoap3.org/.
For a complete list of the SCOAP3 journals, visit http://scoap3.org/scoap3journals