In September, following three years of successful operation and growth, CERN announced the continuation of the global SCOAP3 open-access initiative for at least three more years. SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) is a partnership of more than 3000 libraries, funding agencies and research organisations from 44 countries that has made tens of thousands of high-energy physics articles publicly available at no cost to individual authors. Inspired by the collaborative model of the LHC, SCOAP3 is hosted at CERN under the oversight of international governance. It is primarily funded through the redirection of budgets previously used by libraries to purchase journal subscriptions.
Since 2014, in co-operation with 11 leading scientific publishers and learned societies, SCOAP3 has supported the transition to open access of many long-standing titles in the community. During this time, 20,000 scientists from 100 countries have benefited from the opportunity to publish more than 13,000 open-access articles free of charge.
With strong consensus of the growing SCOAP3 partnership, and supported by the increasing policy requirements for and global commitment to open access in its Member States, CERN has now signed contracts with 10 scientific publishers and learned societies for a three-year extension of the initiative. “With its success, SCOAP3 has shown that its model of global co-operation is sustainable, in the same broad and participative way we build and operate large collaborations in particle physics,” says CERN’s director for research and computing, Eckhard Elsen.
