Eighty representatives from several major physics publishers, European particle-physics laboratories, learned societies, funding agencies and authors from Europe and the US met at CERN on 7-8 December 2005 for the first discussions on promoting open-access publishing. One of the results was the formation of a task-force mandated to bring action by 2007.
Open access is currently a hot topic at universities, publishing houses and governments, as digitized documentation and electronic networking become more mainstream. The particle-physics community has already implemented one of the possible ways for open access to work, whereby institutional libraries, such as CERN’s, make their own information available on the Internet. The other approach is to work directly with scientific publishers to develop open access to the journals.
The aim of open access is to bring greater benefit to society by allowing electronic access to journals to be free to the public, while being paid for by the authors. The time-honoured practice consisted of publishers financing journals through reader subscriptions and ensuring quality by peer review; however, this model favours the wealthier universities and institutions as they can afford the expensive costs of the journals. The challenge for open access is to maintain the quality guaranteed by academic publishers, while broadening access to the information.
The creation of an open-access task-force comes at a crucial time for the world particle-physics community as 2007 brings the launch of a new major facility, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
