From: Ann Okerson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2012 16:14:57 -0400

<http://press.web.cern.ch/>

SCOAP3 Open Access Initiative launched at CERN ["go-live" 1-1-2014]

Geneva 1 October 2012. Representatives from the science funding
agencies and library communities of 29 countries are meeting at CERN
[1] today to launch the SCOAP3 [2] Open Access initiative. Open Access
revolutionizes the traditional scientific publishing model with
scientific papers being made freely available to all, and publishers
paid directly for their indispensable peer-review services to the
community.

“It is gratifying to see how the model of international collaboration
in particle physics has been applied to addressing the important
societal issue of open access to scientific information,” said CERN
Director General Rolf Heuer. “I am proud that CERN has contributed to
exploring win-win solutions to this issue, which is important to both
scientists and science policy makers the world over.”

“It has been very much like working on a CERN experiment,” added
Salvatore Mele, head of Open Access at CERN, who has coordinated the
initiative so far, “amazing collaboration from experts from all over
the world, both volunteers from libraries and partners in the
publishing industry, bringing together their different expertise and
working together to build something never tried before.”

The objective of SCOAP3 is to grant unrestricted access to scientific
articles appearing in scientific journals in the field of particle
physics, which so far have only been available to scientists through
certain university libraries, and generally unavailable to a wider
public. Open dissemination of preliminary information, in the form of
pre-peer review articles known as preprints, has been the norm in
particle physics for two decades. SCOAP3 now brings the vital peer
review service provided by journals into the Open Access world.

In the SCOAP3 model, libraries and funding agencies pool resources
currently used to subscribe to journal content and use them to support
the peer-review system directly instead. Journal publishers then make
their articles Open Access, which means that anyone can read them.
Authors retain the copyright, and generous licenses for re-use are
used.

Publishers of 12 journals, accounting for the vast majority of
articles in the field, have been identified for participation in
SCOAP3 through an open and competitive process, and the SCOAP3
initiative looks forward to establishing more partnerships with key
institutions in Europe, America and Asia as it moves through the
technical steps of organizing the re-direction of funds from the
current subscription model to a common internationally coordinated
fund.

SCOAP3 expects to be operational for articles published as of 2014.

Footnote(s):
1. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the
world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its
headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria,
Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France,
Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland,
Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Romania is a candidate for accession. Israel and Serbia are Associate
Members in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian
Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European
Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.

2. SCOAP3 http://scoap3.org is an international consortium of research
institutions, funding agencies, libraries and library consortia with
the mission of converting to Open Access the peer-reviewed literature
in particle physics, in partnership with leading publishers. It counts
an increasing list of hundreds of interested parties in 29 countries.
http://scoap3.org/whoisscoap3.html