[Insight-developers] SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING: Particle Physicists Want to Expand Open Access -- Kaiser 313 (5791): 1215 -- Science

[Luis Ibanez]

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/313/5791/1215

SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING:
Particle Physicists Want to Expand Open Access
Jocelyn Kaiser

Particle physicists have come up with a novel way to promote free,
immediate access to journal articles. Led by CERN, the giant lab near
Geneva, Switzerland, they want to raise at least $6 million a year to
begin buying open access to all published papers in their field.

The proposal adds fuel to the ongoing debate about public access to
research results. Some private biomedical funding groups, such as the
U.K.'s Wellcome Trust, now pay the author fees required for their
grantees to publish in open-access journals. CERN's announcement goes
further, say observers. "Across a discipline is new," says Peter Suber,
a philosophy professor at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, who
closely follows open-access developments for the Scholarly Publishing
and Academic Resources Coalition.

CERN organizers cite next year's start-up of the Large Hadron Collider
(LHC), the most powerful accelerator ever, as the proposal's motivation.
That will be "a unique opportunity to reform the publishing paradigm of
the particle physics community to ensure the widest, most efficient
dissemination of results from this unique facility," a task force of
CERN, other particle physics funders, and scientific publishers
concluded in a report issued in June.*

To accomplish this goal, the task force proposed that a consortium of
labs and funding agencies pay publication costs for particle physics
papers. It would cost $6 million or more a year to include all the
journals willing to offer an open-access option, the group estimated.
That would cover up to half of the 6000 or so original theory and
experimental papers published each year.

The task force hopes to start with $3 million to implement the policy at
a few major journals. The practice would begin with the first LHC
technical papers next year, says CERN's Rüdiger Voss.

Last week, the American Physical Society announced that a $975 to $1300
payment to its two main journals would make an article available to all
readers (Science, 25 August, p. 1031). Elsevier, the other major
particle physics publisher, recently announced an open-access option for
$3000, an amount not included in the task force's cost estimate. CERN's
plan to sponsor journals would not be permanent: "We see it primarily as
a transition scenario," Voss says, after which funders would pay author
fees for individual grantees.

Nearly all particle physicists already share preprints of their articles
on free servers such as arXiv.org at Cornell University Library. Voss,
however, argues that the final, vetted article is still what academia
values most and that physicists are losing access as budget-strapped
libraries cut back on journal subscriptions. Paul Ginsparg, who runs
arXiv.org, adds that journals serve as stable, long-term archives and
offer extras such as searching for related papers in other journals.