SCOAP3 Extends Open Access Initiative Through 2019

Author: Penny Freedman

By: Grace Baynes, Marketing & Development Director, Open Research Springer Nature

Earlier this month, CERN announced that SCOAP3, the pioneering initiative to enable open access in high-energy physics, will be extended for a further three years to December 2019.

SCOAP3 – the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics is a partnership of 3,000 libraries, funding agencies and research centres in 44 countries, together with 3 intergovernmental organisations. Working with leading publishers, SCOAP3 has converted key journals in High-Energy Physics to Open Access at no cost for authors by redirecting funds previously used for subscriptions.

SCOAP3 will continue to support open access publication of high-energy physics articles in eight participating journals.  This includes two Springer Nature journals, Journal of High Energy Physics (published on behalf of SISSA) and The European Physical Journal C. (co-published with the Italian Physical Society). These journals were participating in SCOAP3 since the beginning, and we are a proud partner of this second phase with the same journals.

Since January 2014, SCOAP3 has supported open access publication of more than 13,000 articles by about 20,000 authors from over 100 countries. About two thirds of these articles are published by the Journal of High Energy Physics and The European Physical Journal C. Articles are published under Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licenses at no direct cost to authors.

We started looking at the impact of open access for these journals: on Springer Nature Link, article downloads have doubled across the two journals when comparing 2013, before SCOAP3 started, to 2015, its second year of operation. Authors are achieving greater reach, with no barriers to access and reuse for readers.

We are very interested in what we can learn from these first three years, and welcome SCOAP3’s willingness to collaborate with participating publishers to mine some of the wealth of data and insight this project has generated.

Community collaborations and pilots like SCOAP3 are essential to help the research community, libraries, funders and publishers work together to understand how we make open access work across disciplines and around the world. We look forward to the next three years of this innovative global collaboration.